I'm looking for testers of the new "Send to" functionality in gretl: it's in gretl CVS and also in the current Windows snapshot.
The idea is that you can quickly and easily (!) send an email to a colleague with a gretl data file or script as attachment, from within gretl itself. If I'd known in advance just how complex this is, I'm not sure I'd have bothered, but anyway... On Windows, this is implemented use the Microsoft MAPI interface. If your email client is properly registered as the default client, and is MAPI-enabled, this 'ought to work'. I've tested with Mozilla 1.7.8 as email client under Windows XP 5.1 and seen it work: "Send to" in gretl calls up Mozilla with the current data file or script as an attachment to a new email message. But I've also seen it fail on a colleague's machine: he uses Mozilla for mail, but gretl's MAPI call somehow activated MS Outlook. Things looked OK (new message with the right file attached), but when he clicked Send in Outlook the mail didn't actually go anywhere. (No error message, but no delivery of mail either.) I have heard from others who are more Microsoft-savvy than I, that flakey behavior from MAPI is not unexpected. On Linux, unfortunately (?), there's no counterpart to MAPI, and there's also a large variety of email clients in common use (Mozilla, Thurderbird, Evolution, Kmail, Balsa, pine, mutt,...). I therefore decided that to implement this functionality on Linux I'd better arrange for gretl to talk to your SMTP server directly. This should work OK if you're able to send mail without authentication. I've also rigged things up so that if your SMTP server does "POP before SMTP" (i.e. you have to first log onto your POP server with username and password, and after that you're allowed to send mail via your SMTP server for a certain interval, e.g., 15 minutes), gretl can handle that. More complex forms of required authentication, I'm afraid, are not currently supported. (One possible workaround under Linux is, if sendmail is enabled on your own workstation, to define your own machine as the SMTP server for gretl's purposes. I've tried this and seen it work, up to a point. But if you're behind a firewall, mail you send out in this way is likely to be received only by others behind the same firewall -- servers out in the wider world will probably reject your mail on the ground that the address of the sending machine does not resolve.) So -- really what I'm asking is whether gretl's "Send to" works well enough to put into the next release, or whether it's just liable to give rise to frustration and voluminous bug reports! Experimental evidence will be gratefully received. Allin Cottrell -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University, NC
