Comments on Routing and Allocation Policy Wanted

Patrick Horgan patrick at Verity.COM
Mon Oct 2 15:58:34 UTC 1995


> From: "Walter O. Haas" <haas at xmission.com>
> 
> Somehow I'm under the impression that it's possible to have SMTP over a
> PPP dialup by logging into the mail server, is that not correct?

Not exactly.  smtp is just a tcp protocol.  You only need to do a tcp 
connection to do smtp. That means that no login to the mail server is
needed to do smtp.  You might have meant something different though.
Let me give a brief overview of issues involved in doing mail via a ppp
connection. The first assumption is that your remote ppp-connected host
doesn't have a full time ppp-connection.  If it did you could just make
it an smtp host.

One easy way to do mail is to nfs mount the directory containing
your email on your ppp connected host and do mail just as you always would.
This isn't always possible since nfs mounting might not work from your host,
(you might not have the appropriate software,) or policy might not allow
it.

The next choice is POP (Post Office Protocol).  With pop, your machine
contacts the pop server on the mailhost and is able to access the mail
in your spool file.  After reading a mail you're able to leave it in
the spool file, or delete it.  (Note that pop passes your password in
the clear:( )  Your MUA (mail user agent, i.e. what you used to read
and send mail), talks SMTP via TCP over PPP directly to the mailhost.

If this is unclear, please send me mail, I could give you a lot more
information.

>                                                                   Assigning
> an IP address on the fly gives better utilization of the space if you can
> get the functionality you need.

Using pop over ppp gets the functionality you need as long as you don't
need a "full time connection."  All the reasons you would need a full time
connection would have implications that you need static IP.

Patrick
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