[drats_users] D-RATS 0.2.7b1 with email gateway

[David Tilson]

G'day all,

A couple of quick experiences worth sharing when I fired up an Email
Gateway, through D-RATS, here:

Just to explain my setup briefly:
IC92AD connected to a laptop and acting as a D-RATS Client.
IC2820H connected to a LAN connected desktop and acting as the D-RATS
Mail Server.
Exchange Mail Server running on a different Win 2003 Server within the
LAN.

I originally had the SMTP Server address in D-RATS set as for my normal
inbound mail (mail.daves-portal.com)

I tried sending an email from the D-RATS client to a mail address within
my network.  The message failed with the following response: 

Error sending mail: (10053, 'Software caused connection abort')

I tracked this back to the anti-virus software on my desktop that was
trying to prevent mass mailing worms to be sent.  By adding d-rats.exe
to its exception list this problem was solved.  I was then able to send
an email from my D-RATS client to within my local mail system.

I then tried sending an email from the D-RATS client to an external
(hotmail.com) address.  The message failed with the following response:

Error sending mail: {'daves_portal at hotmail.com': (550, '5.7.1 Unable to
relay for daves_portal at hotmail.com')}

I tracked this back to Exchange server, which Dan confirmed, even though
I had the server set to allow relay to occur on a specific machine.

I then went to bed...

When I got up I decided to try setting the SMTP Server address, in
D-RATS, to my upstream ISP and it successfully sent emails to both
internal and external email addresses.

Hope this helps anyone playing with this feature that might be
encountering problems.

Dan: A suggested improvement would be to send either the "Mail sent" or
"Error Sending mail" back to the client as they have no indication as to
the success / failure and only know if the form was delivered to the
server.

Cheers,

Davidt, VK3UR