Re: SMTP and Authentication

[Anonymous Monk]

My answer has little to do with Perl, but I ran into the same
problem a while ago with a customers ISP and their mail list.
The ISP wanted to "authorize" the sender before it would send
(this ISP was XO if you are interested)

I couldn't figure out a way either without resulting to a clumbsy
"expect" routine or something of that nature. What I found though
was if I checked for mail first, and logged in that way, then
I was authorized on the send directly afterwards. So, that's
the way the script is written, it checks for mail,
with useing account name and password first and then starts sending
the weekly news letter.

your milage may vary.

[mdog]

Yeah, that means that the way that ISP is doing authentication is through a process called: POP-before-SMTP. There is another form of authentication called SMTP AUTH that won't work with this... Hopefully, this info will help someone else, though. Thanks!

[dws]

If your ISP is using POP-before-SMTP as a way of closing their SMTP servers to unauthorized relaying, you may have a slight latency problem if the POP server isn't on the same box as the SMPT server. My ISP (pair.com) usually takes 2-3 seconds, but sometimes takes upwards of 10 seconds to relay the right message from their POP to their SMPT server.

It takes all of one line of script to work around this. The annoyance was mostly in discovering this behavior.