[Xitami] how add a mail server to xitami

[Paul Reid]

> Or does this "mailserver" really have nothing to do with the "xitami webserver" ?  

Nothing at all to do with the webserver, except the sendmail program
probably should run on the same machine as your scripts. 

Machines can have MANY "servers". HTTP, FTP, mail, time, telnet, DNS,
.....  Xitami combines HTTP and FTP, which is unusual (FTP is far older
than HTTP); for it to add email service would be nice but a bit much. 

The internet, email, and unix grew up together in the same time and
places. So unix machines almost always have a suite of mail services.

Windows grew up un-networked, or with MicroSoft's strange windows-only
mail system, or with clients that did as little as possible to get/send
mail through a real mail server. Also, Windows isn't about command-line
work. So Windows lacks mail tools that most unix boxes have.

The core mail program is a post office, a program to accept, sort,
store, and deliver mail. This generally runs in the background and you
do not talk to it directly. 

To send mail, unix has sendmail, a very simple program to accept a
formatted file and submit it to a post office. The docs for sendmail say
that it isn't made for use by people, a front-end program is needed to
get a nice user interface. But on a script that knows what sendmail
needs, it is the standard way to send mail.

Users on unix systems use mail (a very simple command-line program),
Pine/Elm/etc which are text-mode menu-driven full-screen email managers,
and fancier stuff. Good for people, and you could drive mail with a
script, but overkill for most script work.

There are BIG security risks in running mail services. The biggest is
the post office: traditionally such programs accept mail from strangers
and deliver it anywhere. Spammers love these, because "you" get the
blame for their spam. I would be real wary of some post office from
unknown authors, with mystery options and unknown bugs. Also, older
emailers may not block newly discovered hacker tricks. Craig's program
looks excellent, but read the docs well and be sure to talk to him or
experienced postmasters to be sure your postoffice is secure.

If you just want script-driven mail sending, you may not need your own
post office. Your ISP surely runs a postofffice and should accept email
from machines on internal IP numbers (or with authentication). Configure
sendmail to submit mail through your ISP's post office. I found one for
Windows that can do this, but it is exceptionally hard to set up, and
the usual perl script must be hacked to feed it right. I'll probably
move to a full mail suite the next time this one frustrates me. 

(I'm shocked that there does not seem to be a "universal" sendmail
written directly in Perl. The net::SMTP module has the essentials, and I
have a rough draft working under Windows, but with hard-coded message
headers and body, not in the way sendmail expects.)

 -PRR