PBEM helper now available

[Puke]

hey guys. I have been having some problems with the helper and sending out turns. here is what I have observed:

the MAPI mail features do not seem to work when another MAPI compliant mail client is open. at first I thought that multiple profiles were throwing it off, but it seems to work only when all other MAPI mail programs are closed.

The SMTP support seems to rely on having OPEN MAIL RELAYS. for those of you who dont know, this is generally considered a BAD practice and leads to spam portals, and is the very kind of thing those stupid nazis at ORBS go around DoS'ing fortune 500 companies for. basically what i am saying, is since the software is trying to drop mail onto an smtp server instead of actually logging onto (with username / pass) a POP mailbox, any properly configured SMTP server will only accept mail for local accounts, and therefore if i logged onto MY server, and tried to send mail to somewhere else, it would be denied since open relays are 'bad' and most SMTP ports are now only good for receiving mail.

<<edit: admiral says puke is dumb, pop is inbound only and even though it supports authentication it will do nothing here. puke is also dumb because he forgot dialup ISPs offer internal smtp servers that will relay without being visible to the public net. puke is sorry he is so dumb, but some of those issues still stand>>


..so, what I should be able to do is have it log on to my smtp server, send the mail to ME, and then I could forward it off to the correct destination with a POP, WEB, MAPI, or any other client in an ordinary fashion. when I tried this, the mail was not rejected as 'unknown address' or 'address not present locally' but instead I got some long string of output from the PBEM helpers smtp client window, and it scrolled by before I could read it, and the SMTP helpers error dialog stole context from me so I could not even access the scroll bars in the smtp dialogue.. so I cant figure out why that was not working, but I can tell you that it demonstrated the same behavior when talking to an exchange 5.5 and an exchange 2000 smtp server. I have not tried a sendmail server, if anyone would care to give this a shot, it would probably be helpful.

now dont get me wrong, this isnt a gripe. this is constructive input from the beta testing squad, and I have to appologize to the PBW guys out there that I have not been able to spend enough time on that service to put together the same level of feedback as I had promised, but hopefully when everything is fine-tuned, it will all be kosher pickles.

I think the PBEM Helper SMTP support may need to be changed to POP support if people dont have a mapi compatible client, but that still wont help the web-mail guys, whom are basically f-ed and will have to do it manually. the SMTP support would be perfect in conjunction with the play by web service though, since the SMTP server could just be pointed to the central web server that is hosting everything. that would even ensure faster turnaround and no email delay, since it would be dropped directly to the destination mail server from each player.


[This message has been edited by Puke (edited 30 April 2001).]