Submit Hint Search The Forums LinksStatsPollsHeadlinesRSS
14,000 hints and counting!


Click here to return to the 'Send mail from outside a firewalll via Mail.app' hint
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Send mail from outside a firewalll via Mail.app
Authored by: gvaughn on Aug 29, '03 12:00:56PM

Great hint! I've been gradually working to get all the pieces together for myself for a while. But there's one thing I'd like to know. What happens if the network connection is dropped and later reconnects? Will this handle things gracefully -- the new call to localhost:1025 will re-open the tunnel if it is not currently open?



[ Reply to This | # ]
Send mail from outside a firewalll via Mail.app
Authored by: gvaughn on Aug 29, '03 12:03:37PM

One other question: my investigations had led me to xinetd instead of inetd. What's the advantage of using one over the other?



[ Reply to This | # ]
xinetd vs. inetd
Authored by: nyarlathotep on Aug 31, '03 03:22:08PM

xinetd is a far superior program, but Mac OS X (and maybe all BSDs) come with inetd, so its less work to use that one. You could install a user space xinetd daemon, but thats really too much work (unless you do not have root access on your PowerBook).

You could also modify this hint for xinetd if your using a Linux laptop, execpt that this would be silly, as Linux would include more serious mail readers like mutt.



[ Reply to This | # ]
xinetd vs. inetd
Authored by: gvaughn on Aug 31, '03 03:35:47PM

My Powerbook G4 running 10.2.6 shows both xinetd and inetd in the process list. I believe I read somewhere that inetd is subordinate to xinetd in OS X (now, what version that started, I'm not sure).

In light of this, would we be better off using xinetd?



[ Reply to This | # ]
xinetd vs. inetd
Authored by: nyarlathotep on Aug 31, '03 05:16:49PM

I'm running only inetd on my PowerBook under 10.2.6, but you may have gotten an xinetd installed via fink.. or you may have a more recent 10.2.6 patch.

The truth is that it should not matter what you use. Starting an ssh process is lots of overhead and having one inetd pass the call off to another should be an unnoticible delay. So your question really should be "What should we do to make this a robust change?" i.e. what can we do to prevent an upgrade from breaking this. I have absolutely no idea. Infact, that is part of why I bothered to submit this hint was to provide myself with a permenent record of just what the hell I did, so that I can undo / redo it after 10.3 breaks everything. :)



[ Reply to This | # ]
Send mail from outside a firewalll via Mail.app
Authored by: tomn on Aug 29, '03 02:23:42PM

This opens the tunnel each time your mail program tries to connect to the server. It's then closed when you're done sending mail or logout of the IMAP/POP server. SO.. the tunnel isn't up all the time anyway and Mail.app will re-connect if it fails.



[ Reply to This | # ]