[Pkg-exim4-users] Support for tls on connect on outgoing smtp connections?

[ael]

On Mon, Dec 08, 2014 at 07:33:39AM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
> ael <law_ence.dev at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> > One major UK ISP does not support STARTTLS on their "smarthost"/smtp
> > server. Even on an alternative port: hard to believe but sadly true
> > it seems.

I have just got back to this after a busy time on other things. I now
have it working with
	protocol = smtps.
I have discovered why it did not work before.

The problem was that the name of the smarthost was aliased, so it did
not match the entry in /etc/exim4/passswd.client.

As you can see by looking at the headers on this message which was sent
via that smarthost, its name is mail.btinternet.com, but this is an
alias for mail.btinternet.bt.lon5.cpcloud.co.uk. Since that alias may
change, it is a bit fragile to put that explicitly into
/etc/exim4/passswd.client
but that is what I have done for the moment. I now realise that I have
met this problem before with another smarthost, so it seems to be a
common situation.

The debian template does not seem to cater for this, or have I missed
something?

Otherwise, I will see if I can write the required dns lookup for a more
robust password check via /etc/exim4/passwd.client. Should I bug report
this, perhaps with my potential patch?

Also, would it be simple to add another variable to
update-exim4.conf(.conf) to control whether "protocol = smtps" appears
in the smarthost transport. Just a conditional there?

ael