Hi Steve,

On 02:05 PM 3/12/2002 or thereabouts, you wrote:
 >What alternatives are there for an SMTP service colocated on the Listserv
 >box? I seem to recall a new one recently being announced.

First the good news.  I have Post.Office (3.5.3) and eventually got it to
work with Listserv Lite 1.8d.

You need 2 MX records, one for mail.yourdomain.net and another for
listserv.yourdomain.net, both resolving to the same IP.
Edit your site.cfg file, add the line SMTP_LISTENER_PORT=1234 (for example)
Create an entry in Post.Office's SMTP routing table to route all messages
from listserv.yourdomain.net to mail.yourdomain.net#1234 (continuing the
example).
Restart the Listserv and SMTP listener services (running Win2K Advanced
Server here).
Send a "thank you" message to [log in to unmask]

Getting that first "You're welcome!" reply was most gratifying.

Then the bad news.  Test replies started to queue up on the Post.Office
server, rejected by several large sites like attbi.com and
yahoo.com.  Turns out that the outbound Listserv messages are relayed (even
though you might think they're local) and have null (<>) User-From and
Reply-Tos in the envelope and header.  This is in compliance with RFCs 822
& 1123,  but these big sites appear to be rejecting such messages since
they "might be spam".

Plan B.  I installed LSMTP Lite evaluation version and it worked like a
charm.  This free version appends an [ Eval blurb ] in the subject line of
every outbound message and 6 lines of Comments: in some classes of
messages.  For $500 and $100 per year maintenance (for LSMTP Lite, 10
threads, rated at 10,000 messages per hour, no mail merge), you can make
these two items disappear.

If you know Post.Office well, let me know and we can revisit the
issue.  All these pieces are services (on Win2K) and you can start, stop,
and/or disable them easily.  You don't have to uninstall anything until
you're happy with the result.

The Business Mail Gateway that you may have seen is just that, a gateway
rather than a mail server.  As such, I don't think it will be able to solve
the problem, since the relaying will still occur and if such relays have
nulls in the envelope and header, the same sites will probably reject the
messages.

Hope this helps,
George Radford
[log in to unmask]