Stefan,
A million thanks! Local host works!
Too simple -- too logical! I would never have imagined that Alpine
wouldn't have worked without that.
Going to my mounted backup drive Look at how long I haven't needed to
change one of the shell configuration files! ...:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
pwd /home/...
cd oldq3/ ls -l .cshrc -rw------- 1 ... ... 2707 Sep 23 2002 .cshrc
--------------------------------------------------------------
Of course I regularly change certain minor features in pine/Alpine's
.pinerc so last change was earlier this month. I am sure I never changed
the smpt-server configuration, however. [not showing the .pinerc file
date here since it changes often]
Extract from old .pinerc -- smtp-server was always left blank up till now...
---------------------------------------------------------------
# List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Pine uses sendmail.
smtp-server=
# NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading.
nntp-server=
Now going into the newly installed Alpine mail client Setup/Configure menu
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
SMTP Server (for sending) = <Empty Value>
NNTP Server (for news) = <No Value Set>
I NOTE THAT FIRST USE AFTER NEW INSTALL, if there is no .pinerc file yet,
it immediately tries to send a message back to the maintainers at U. of
Washington, and obviously expects that to work, but instead, it immediately
hangs. That probably means that something in how OpenBSD is configured
these days, doesn't allow for that. But maybe it should, or rather, a small
change in the patches for the Alpine port configuration, for OpenBSD, could
allow for it to immediately send from the box where Alpine was just newly
installed.
Looking directly into the new .pinerc file:
Extract follows:
# List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail.
smtp-server=
# NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading.
nntp-server=
/Extract
i.e. same as ever
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now after using the Setup/Configure menu in the latest version from 6.8
packages and setting the server to "localhost", as you suggested, the
.pinerc looks like:
Extract:
# List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail.
smtp-server=localhost
# NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading.
nntp-server=
/Extract
AND THAT WORKS LIKE A CHARM!
What's really curious is the statement in .pinerc that "If blank: Unix
Alpine uses sendmail." Well to me that implies that it would use sendmail
on the local host, so one wouldn't think that one would also have to
specify it in the setup menu for first use. --- After one already had to
deal with the initial "hang"!
I note that the sendmail we now have is the pseudo Sendmail provided by
the newer smpt/smptd system. I can't see that being the problem. Maybe
some patch to Alpine was made for tighter OpenBSD security, or there is
some additional system configuration I should have attended to these days.
I'll put into my todo list to do a little more code digging, and look at
the port if no one else gets to it. At the moment I have an incredible
backlog of work and apologies to make for lost incoming emails after being
down for a week, and also not replying even after incoming email was
working and I had the awkward work-around of "Mail".
I note that .calendar is not working for me. Wonder if it is a related kind
of deeper problem in my system setup. Not critical though....
Most Alpine users (if any are still left), probably use an external mail
server, and would have filled in something, so would never see this problem.
Still would like to hear from any regular OpenBSD Alpine users.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Now to set up a new webserver too. And then maybe even do some crucial
Year End company paperwork.... [Wish I had some time left for
programming!]
Stefan, again, thanks so much.
Regards,
Austin Hook
Milk River, Canada
On Sat, 23 Jan 2021, Stefan Hagen wrote:
> Hi Austin,
>
> aus...@computershop.ca wrote:
> > 2) Any reason why the new pseudo-Sendmail wouldn't handle Apline as
> > well as the old one did?
>
> This mailing list is mostly for porting work and not for questions about
> functionality or bugs that are not related to the porting process but
> the software itself.
>
> That being said, I played around with alpine. You're right. If you leave
> "smtp-server=" empty, sending an email gets stuck as you described.
>
> I've tried to set "smtp-server=" to localhost as well as to my
> SMTP/SMTPs OpenSMTPd server. Those configurations are working fine and
> maybe you can use one of these?
>
> Why it gets stuck when falling back to the sendmail binary, I don't
> know. Using the sendmail binary manually is working here.
>
> The correct list to address this would be: https://opensmtpd.org/list.html
>
> Best Regards,
> Stefan
>
