Re: [Nmh-workers] Re: should nmh be an MTA or an MUA?

[Earl Hood]

On January 28, 2010 at 15:39, Ken Hornstein wrote:

> I am guessing (I do not know for sure) that the original designers didn't
> want to have to duplicate code and they figured since the -bs mode would
> allow them to reuse the SMTP code, that's what they went with.

That is my assumption.

> Note that I have no objection to anyone fixing this so nmh can be used
> with more standalone mailers/proxies/what have you.  Someone just has
> to write the code.

A problem is that MH/nmh rely on SMTP operations to achieve
certain functionality.  So any modifications must take that
into account.

An example: The differences between envelope recipients and
what is actually listed in the RFC (2)822 header.

Many of the lightweight sendmail replacement programs
will grab address from the message header to determine
recipients, and this behavior is undesirable for nmh uses.

If they support setting the envelope recipients as argv to the
program and do not parse message from stdin, then functionality may
be preserved.  Of course, a check must be made to see that nmh does
not perform any other envelope-based operations besides specifying
recipients.

--ewh