Steven Jenkins wrote:
...
> 
> 
> I think Lothar was asking about the sending end of the transaction. As 
> for the receiving end, any real MTA gives you the ability to specify the 
>  delivery agent--deliver to a mailbox, pipe to a process, whatever. It's 
> not Ruby, but it'd be pretty simple to set up Postfix to do just what 
> you said. Postfix is pretty.

Ah.  Still, I'd like an app that listened on port 25 and knew the HELO, 
and so on, commands, so that there would be no dependency on some 
external MTA.  (This is probably not so hard to do, maybe more a matter 
of time; I think at one point I had to go poking around the SMTP 
protocol so that some bit of code could talk directly to the recipient 
process.

I've seen some Sendmail stuff that invokes a process, but it always 
seemed painful to go learn the little quirks of yet another 
mini-language so that my app can process mail.

(Still, MTAs make handy message queues for inter-app communication.)


James