Hello... and @email

[Kristian Hansen]

Thanks for adding me to this group, I've already found some very helpful support in earlier posts so thanks for that too.

I wonder if anybody knows about the issues around using @email and can help me. I've attempted to set up access to an SMTP server, however it was only a free public server and the parameters I provided might well have been wrong, or access to the server may have been denied. The effect of trying to send an email was to completely crash the MUX, requiring a server reboot to get it back up again.

I'm now thinking about setting up an SMTP server on my CentOS VPS for sending out email and trying that, but obviously I don't want to crash the MUX too often and wondered if there are any known issues to watch out for when using @email before I start. Any guidance on this would be much appreciated, as it's perhaps the only thing I'm still unable to solve after research.

Thanks again for admitting me to the group :)

/<

[Stephen Dennis]

When you say 'crash', I assume you mean 'hang'. The @email code in TinyMUX is best used again a local SMTP server, or one close by that you know is reliably always up. The difficult and unpredictable trek across the Internet is an adventure then best left to E-mail infrastructure best able to handle -- down servers, unreachable servers, E-mail addresses which longer exist, bounced mail, read and out-of-office notifications. The code for @email in TinyMUX does the minimal task it was written for, but it is on the same game thread as everything else, and it performs blocking network calls. So, as you found out, it can and does hang.

[Kristian Hansen]

Yes, I do mean hang - it was pretty long, so I thought of it as a crash, but accurately, I think it hung.

Thanks for that. For what needs doing, a local SMTP server will be more than capable. I think I've figured out the config I can use for a local Sendmail server on my VPS, using its built in aliasing filters to add the slightly increased complexity required, so the MUX does the minimal task and sendmail does the rest. I will be trying it tomorrow.

Thanks again,

/<