I have suffered from important emails not being received, while I do not receive a bounce message.
I wonder whether one factor in this problem is that my laptop, which sometimes has a dynamically-allocated IP address, appears to be the sender if Alpine talks directly to some (major) SMTP server. My email may get less respect if it comes from a laptop.
So can I change the smtp-server
setting in Alpine to use sendmail on a different (fixed IP) machine, rather than the sendmail on my laptop?
I have passwordless ssh keys set up already my remote (tunnel) server. What string can I put to tell Alpine to tunnel elsewhere for sendmail?
Right now for smtp-server
I am just specifying a remote SMTP server's IP name and port number, with the Alpine-format tls
or ssl
and user=
string, but I want instead to pass these via ssh to the mailer on another GNU/Linux machine.
(I'm actually using the smtp-rules
setting rather than the default smtp-server
setting.)
A bit more detail (to explain my motivation):
Here is the bottom part of the header of a very important email message which was never received (major damage ensued) and which generated no bounce:
Received: from Mylaptop-high (192-0-111-216.cpe.teksavvy.com [192.0.111.216])
(authenticated bits=0)
(User authenticated as [email protected])
by outgoing-alum.mit.edu (8.14.7/8.12.4) with ESMTP id 03F39FMc032212
(version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=DHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384 bits=256 verify=NOT);
Tue, 14 Apr 2020 23:09:16 -0400
Date: Tue, 14 Apr 2020 23:09:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: C P meuser <[email protected]>
To: Important recipient <[email protected]>
Subject: life or death emergency
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.2.21.200411111170.2116@Mylaptop-high>
User-Agent: Alpine 2.21 (DEB 202 2017-01-01)
Other servers will look at this and find that it originated on my laptop, which was currently at home with my ISP's IP (teksavvy). Not optimally, I sent it via MIT's smtp server rather than McGill's. However, MIT authenticated me and successfully delivered it back to me through a bcc address. But something stopped it getting to the Recipient. That, presumably, was a Microsoft server which McGill uses.
So my concern is that maybe it looks bad to have something coming from my laptop, which is portable, as a first MTA. Maybe that is wrong. When I'm at work, the same laptop has a fixed IP and an IP name, but this was sent from home. I don't really know what I'm fighting, but I'm trying to minimize reasons to reject my emails. So if (especially when at home) I sent from a fixed IP machine at work (ssh pipe) rather than from my laptop, maybe it would be better.