Email and smtpd ? ? ?

[StarBuck]

Quick question when sending emails from Say Entourage, Mail or Eudora are you using the built-in smtpd daemon. Or do these applications use a built in smtp service ??

 

[lurk]

Neither, generally you connect to the SMTP server you ISP is running or one local to your network. For instance I use smtp.mywork.com inside the firewall and smtp.myspiffyisp.com when I am on the road or at home. In all these interactions the mail application is the client.

You only need to *run* a SMTP service if you want to have your machine serve as the mail server for your domain. So it would handle all incoming mail for everybody at your domain. This is not a user type thing to do.

 

[StarBuck]

Thanks for the reply.

But if you want to send emails you have to smtp for outbound email on port 25.

So would this be using smtpd or a built in smtp agent ?

 

[lurk]

Thanks for the reply.

But if you want to send emails you have to smtp for outbound email on port 25.

Not quite you connect to port 25. The port you connect form is not important and a random port above 1024 will be selected automatically by the system.

So would this be using smtpd or a built in smtp agent ?

This is exactly parallel to the web browser / web server distinction. Your web browser does not require you to be running a local web server for you to access a web page. Email is exactly the same. You do not need to run your own mail delivery server to send mail.

Hope that helps,
-Eric

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I think the short answer is, "neither." The email applications neither use the smtp daemon nor their own internal smtp handler.

For smtp to work, the server has to be running it (in my case, mail.mac.com or the like) and your client email program simply needs to make a network connection to a certain port on that server, which is independent of smtp-anything. The client then just sends bits of information formatted to a certain specification, then the server handles the rest.