On 2021-02-12, Derek Martin <inva...@pizzashack.org> wrote: > >>> as I would have to be monitoring the logs to make sure the e-mail >>> was actually sent. >> >> You do (or you need to make sure that you receive bounce/retry/failure >> notices properly). > > You don't... every major MTA has a tool for monitoring the outgoing > mail queue. You just run it and it tells you if there is any pending > outgoing e-mail.
To me that seems pretty much equivalent to "monitorying the logs". > If this is a concern, you can run it periodically from cron (or > whatever), in such a way that it only e-mails you when there are > issues (i.e. pending mail). If you find some messages are > lingering, then you can go look at your logs to figure out why. Again, that's far more complicated that waiting one or two seconds after you hit 'y', and seeing whether the message was sent or not. >>> How does it work when the remote e-mail server is not available or >>> it returns some kind of error. Can one receive local messages that >>> notify of a problem? >> >> If you set up your local MTA properly, yes. > > In practice you probably won't do this, unless you have the luxury of > operating a relay that is purely for outgoing messages that can't > receive mail from the internet. Otherwise the reality is you'll get > tons of bogus bounce messages that are just spam. Or perhaps you'll > use some spam filtering to figure out which bounce messages actually > matter... There are better alternatives, like what I described above. > >> My internet connection is reliable enough that the benefits of knowing >> that each email has actually been sent _far_ outweigh the >> inconvienience of having to manually resend something once every 5-6 >> years. > > YMMV. I have maintained my own server for ~20+ years now and the only > time I've had issues was when I was running it on consumer broadband > and people started using blacklists that included essentially all > known consumer broadband networks to block spam (whther it was or > not), That is probably the main problem for most mutt users. The only practical way for must of us to run an MTA is for it to always send via one reliabe SMTP server with authentication. Sending mail directly to recipients has been off the table for residential consumers. > It does have a down side though... if your recipient's mail gateway > is down or unreachable, sending your mail will fail, and you'll have > to try again manually, until it eventually succeeds. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I can't ever remember the last time that happened. > If you use an outgoing mail relay it fixes this for you by > periodically retrying the message. This is pretty rare these days > though so it probably won't matter to you very much, unless you have > frequent recipients with proven unreliable mail gateways.
