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sending mail: starttls and gnutls-cli sessions


From: Marco Maggi
Subject: sending mail: starttls and gnutls-cli sessions
Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:27:06 +0200

Ciao,

  I want to send email through two remote servers, Gmail and
Poste.it, using  gnutls-cli for  authentication.  I am  on a
GNU+Linux system running Emacs 22.3.1 from the latest stable
Slackware package.

  I can successfully send mail through Gmail both using Gnus
and  using an  interactive  eshell session  in  which I  run
gnutls-cli directly and write  SMTP commands by hand.  Fine,
I know that it can work.

  When running the  eshell session for Gmail, I  do this: in
the eshell buffer

$ gnutls-cli --crlf --starttls --port 587 smtp.gmail.com

and the server replies with  a line of greetings; so I start
an SMTP dialogue and issue the STARTTLS SMTP command; now on
a xterm  I send a  SIGALRM signal to the  running gnutls-cli
process,  and  it establishes  the  encrypted bridge.   Then
everything  works.  I  assume that  this is  what  Gnus does
using the underlying libraries.

  Now with Poste.it I can  do the same on an eshell session,
but I have to leave out the "--starttls" option:

$ gnutls-cli --crlf --port 465 relay.poste.it

because  the  server  wants  the  encrypted  bridge  set  up
immediately.   Alternatively  I  can start  gnutls-cli  with
"--starttls" and immediately send  a SIGALRM to the process,
without waiting for server's greetings.

  Reading the  documentation of  Gnus and Smtpmail  I cannot
find a way to  select command line parameters for gnutls-cli
or to  tell it to  send SIGALRM immediately  without messing
with undocumented internal state of the libraries.

  I  see in  "starttls.el" that  a relevant  function  is be
`starttls-open-stream-gnutls'.  In the form:

(apply #'start-process name buffer
       starttls-gnutls-program "-s" host
       "-p" (if (integerp port) (int-to-string port) port)
       starttls-extra-arguments)

it  makes  use  of  the  "-s" option,  which  is  short  for
"--starttls".   So  the  way   to  go  is  to  send  SIGALRM
immediately.  Then the form:

    (while (and (processp process)
                (eq (process-status process) 'run)
                (save-excursion
                  (set-buffer buffer)
                  (goto-char old-max)
                  (not (setq done (re-search-forward
                                   starttls-connect nil t)))))
      (accept-process-output process 0 100)
      (sit-for 0.1))

waits for  gnutls-cli text  telling that the  connection was
established ("Simple  Client Mode"); fine this  is should be
read correctly because I see it in the interactive session.

  So I have to turn  to "smtpmail.el", which is BIG!  Here I
guess  that  the problem  is  in `smtpmail-via-smtp',  which
seems  to   always  try  to  send  a   EHLO  command  before
considering a call to `starttls-negotiate'.

  My problem is that when `smtpmail-via-smtp' does:

(setq greeting (smtpmail-read-response process))

Gnus blocks waiting for  input that will never arrive, until
I stop it with C-g.

  What  to  do? Do  I  have to  send  a  feature request  to
someone?
-- Marco Maggi


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