Re: Misc. as part of usage testing

Mark Millard to Anton Shepelev:

> > This setup looks very wrong to me, because the same account
> > is split between two disparate universes: using NNTP for
> > incoming messages and SMTP for outgoing ones.  This may
> > explan why you read via NNTP yet post via SMTP.
>
> For news.gmane.io in thunderbird (and probably more
> generally), if a SMTP server is defined in Thunderbird,
> news.gmane.io uses one of them.

No, it simply makes no sense.  A Usenet (NNTP) server has
nothing at all to do with an e-mail (SMTP) server, except the
very looselyt coupled connection when you specify your e-mail
address in your NNTP account, but that is just the value of a
header in the NNTP message, nothing more.  NNTP works for both
reading and posting without any involvement of SMTP.

> It appears that the only way to avoid that is to never have
> filled in a Outgoing Server (SMTP) in Thunderbird or using the
> (config editor...)  button in Settings to get to Advanced
> Preferences and to reset and delete appropriate definitions.

It sure sounds wrong.  No tutorials that I see mention SMTP at
all, e.g. the one below seems like a good tutorial (save for the
specific NNTP-server details), and with screenshots:

   <https://web.archive.org/web/20250121115404/https://www.i2pn2.org/common/Thunderbird/Usenet-Thunderbird.html>

It shows a configured account with just the NNTP server, without
even the incoming/outgoing distinction:

   <https://web.archive.org/web/20250121115404im_/https://www.i2pn2.org/common/Thunderbird/5-Congratulations.png>

> The UI for newsgroups makes no reference to Incoming vs.
> Outgoing for NNTP, biased to implicitly both.

That's right.

> But if an SMTP Outgoing server is defined it seems to be what
> is used for Outgoing.

And that's... strange.

> So I got Thunderbird back to being just NNTP, no outgoing SMTP
> server.
>
> Retrying sending ot just the Newgroup: No message in list so
> far (15+ min).
>
> Attempting to send with both the Newsgroups filled in and the
> To filled in just waits until one clicks Cancel to the
> progress dialog. Even then it shows it is still an active,
> pending send.

In Usenet/NetNews/NNTP mode, the To: field should not be visible
and available at all, as shown in another screenshot from the
tutorial above:

   <https://web.archive.org/web/20250121115404im_/https://www.i2pn2.org/common/Thunderbird/16-Followup.png>