E-mail, graphical and otherwise

[David Banning]

> Coming from the old school of System V, I am accustomed to using command line 
> email for many things. Of course, in this day and age I have moved on to 
> GUIs, and the mailers they provide. They surely are far more practical than 
> the original /bin/mail and mailx I worked with in the old days.

I use mutt, which is not graphical and I like it a lot better than graphical
clients. I use it for command line interface in scripts too.

> for relaying of my email to the outside world. I would just point sendmail 
> at my ISP's mail system, and away my email would go to its intended 
> recipient.
> 
> As spammers have appeared, my ISp has tightened the security on the system 
> they allow to relay through them. They now require authentication.
Are you sure about the authentication they are using? Most authentication
I have seen by ISP's is via the IP address. After all it's -their-
IP address you are using, right?

> With the graphical mailers, this is not a problem. I select Authenticated SMTP 
I have used netscape and I don't even see smtp authentication available.

> The command line is another story. When I configure sendmail to do the smart 
> host, and I generate email from the command line there is no authentication 
> being performed, AND to make matters worse, my ISP's machine insists on being 
> able to perform a reverse lookup of my IP address to let me relay. Like most 

Have you confirmed this with maillog and your ISP?

What graphical email clients are you using that now perform SMTP 
authentication?

Pardon me if I am sounding suspicious, but I know I have had problems
similar to yours, which disappeared when I had sendmail configured 
properly.