These are the esmtp features:
Since the moment I switched to Linux I had some problems to have email properly configured to my personal needs. I use a POP3/SMTP mail account for my personal mail, and I usually connect to the internet with my laptop via several LANs (home, work, ...) with several different firewall configurations. The standard MTAs didn't provided the flexibility I needed -- they either failed to deliver the mail directly or failed to authenticate with the relay, or were configured system-wide and conflicted with the local MTA.
fetchmail always worked fine to get email, but I needed a sendmail alike program to send email from Mutt. Basically I wanted a program which could be for SMTP what fetchmail was for POP3, i.e., an user configurable MTA with authorization support.
Some small modifications to the mail-file example from libESMTP did the trick. After receiving positive feedback from the libESMTP author, Brian Stafford, I decided to make the program more comfortable for others to use -- adding a command-line option parser extracted from sendmail, a configuration file parser from fetchmail, a man page based on ssmtp and sendmail man pages and using the autotools to wrap it all up. The result of this cut and paste effort was esmtp. Well, the first version, that is. Since then a few more bells and whistles were added, with the help of some contributors.
Last modified on 2011-02-14.