problems with Mutt and esmtp

[Ross A. Beyer]

> > I'm having a problem getting the Mutt and esmtp programs to work
> > together.  What happens is that when I run Mutt and hit send, Mutt
> > will just hang forever displaying its "Sending message..." message.
> > I think that it might be something to do with the sending of the
> > control character signalling the end of message, but I don't know
> > for sure.
>
>You might use the ``tcpflow'' program to look at the traffic between
>mutt and the mail server.  Tcpflow uses a command syntax virtually
>identical to tcpdump, but splits out each connection into separate
>files making it much easier to look at the converstation.

Bill,

Thanks for your reply, but I guess I don't understand how that would
help me.  My problem is not inter-machine communication, it seems
to be inter-process communication.  Both Mutt and esmtp work
independently of each other.  I can have Mutt use the local sendmail
and it works fine.  I can run esmtp from the command line locally
(presumably just like Mutt would) and it happily creates an SSH
tunnel to the remote server, and talks to the sendmail daemon there,
and delivers.  However, when I have 'set sendmail="/usr/local/bin/esmtp"'
in my ~/.mutt/muttrc Mutt just hangs trying to send the mail, no
error message, nothing.

Perhaps I'm not understanding how tcpflow would help me diagnose
what things are being traded between these two programs running
locally.

I know that tons of people must be using Mutt & esmtp together just
fine.  Is there a particular config variable that I didn't set, a
peculiarity that I'm not taking into account, or something about
FreeBSD or my shell (tcsh) that is intercepting a control character
or something?
-- 
                                             Ross