ps: I have just seen Stefan Monnier's message, and gone and looked at MH
again, and I see that something changed since the last time I looked at
this part of MH. I was wrong, as he points out... I have no idea whether
nmh has this post/spost split as well (as I have said before, I don't use
nmh).
And while the "post always uses smtp" is right, that's not really important
here, what is is whether the site is expected to have something listening on
port 25 - to run "sendmail -bs" that isn't required, and that is the real
issue. It doesn't really matter much to anyone whether you run "sendmail
-bs"
or "sendmail addr addr addr..." (and for many purposes, not much more if
you run "sendmail -t", though I don't much like that variation).
Other than some small configuration changes and bugfixes, the "backend"
of nmh is the same as MH. There is both a "post" and "spost" binary.
post - default method of sending mail. Currently always uses SMTP, either
by connecting directly to port 25 (default) or by forking a copy
of sendmail with "sendmail -bs".
spost - send mail by forking mail, and passing message to sendmail on
standard input. This is the method most other mail clients use.
A user can change which "postproc" to use by adding the line
postproc: spost
to his .mh_profile.
Now each method above has its advantages and disadvantages (doesn't
everything).
In nmh, I plan to eventually merge spost and post into a single command. Then
you will be able to decide which method to use when configuring the system
(I haven't decide whether it should be a runtime or compile-time option).
--
Richard Coleman
coleman(_at_)math(_dot_)gatech(_dot_)edu