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Q: transporting SMTP on floppy disks - "transparent sneakernetting" ( No Answer,   1 Comment )
Question  
Subject: transporting SMTP on floppy disks - "transparent sneakernetting"
Category: Computers > Internet
Asked by: skiprosebaugh-ga
List Price: $15.00
Posted: 29 Aug 2003 07:53 PDT
Expires: 10 Sep 2003 07:17 PDT
Question ID: 250164
I need a way to "sneakernet" a SMTP connection...
The situation is, the computer my email client is on is not connected
to the net. I do have another computer that is connected, though. My email
computer is Mac OS X (but it does have a Windows emulator), and the
internet computer is Windows 98. I need some way to run a SMTP
"server" on my email computer, have it save all outgoing messages to
files, copy those files to the internet computer, and forward them to
my real SMTP server. I've tried using emailrelay, a free solution that
I found on freshmeat, but it doesn't work for some unknown reason.
I also need to do the reverse procedure for my POP3 account, but I
think fetchmail will handle that easily.

Free (in both senses of the term) software is preferred.

Clarification of Question by skiprosebaugh-ga on 03 Sep 2003 09:28 PDT
No, hobbes, there is no network connection between the computers at
all. The "internet computer" doesn't even have a network card - it
uses wireless ethernet. The reason that the setup is like this is very
long and complicated, so I didn't want to go into it, but the only way
to exchange data between the two computers is via floppy disks or USB
flash drives or that sort of thing.

Clarification of Question by skiprosebaugh-ga on 04 Sep 2003 09:36 PDT
ia, I'm posting your clarification here instead of emailing, because
the whole point of this question is to enable me to send email (right
now I can't.)

1. I use Mail. It's the mail client designed by Apple for Mac OS X.
I'm using the updated version that came with OS 10.2.

2. No, I won't. I used mutt in conjunction with exim and fetchmail for
years, but even that had its limitations compared to Mail, for what
I'm doing. (Although Mail lacks a few features I miss from mutt, such
as the ability to use actual .signature files.)

3. Yes, it's Mac OS X, and I have the developer tools, as I use quite
a lot of unix software, much of which must be compiled. gcc is
installed.
Answer  
There is no answer at this time.

Comments  
Subject: Re: transporting SMTP on floppy disks - "transparent sneakernetting"
From: hobbes1220-ga on 03 Sep 2003 00:52 PDT
 
Hi, skiprosebaugh.

Could you please tell me if the email computer at least has some sort
of network connection to the computer that does have internet access? 
I'd like to keep floppies out of the picture if at all possible. ;) 
It would be great if you have one computer with two network cards, or
each computer with only one network card, but you have a hub or
switch, .. anything like that.

skiprosebaugh, if you do have a network connection between the email
computer and the net access computer, there are several solutions at
hand.

Internet Connection sharing would be my #1 recommendation.  Then your
mac would actually have internet access!  If you have (or want to buy)
the right hardware, it's easy to set up.

Or, #2, simple port-forward.  By this, I mean, run a program on your
win98 pc that listens on some port for traffic coming from your mac. 
The program would automagically forward that traffic to your smtp
server.  Then set your mac's email software to use win98pc as the smtp
server (on that certain port).  The mac wouldn't know that the
connection is being forwarded, and neither would the smtp server. 
Which program?  I'd recommend putty, a win32 ssh client.

If you don't have any sort of network connection at all on the email
box, and you really want to use floppies, .. it can be done.  But
before I figure out how, I'm going to wait to see if you have a
network connection.  ;)

This is an interesting and entertaining question.  Thanks. =)
Post with info about the network connection, and we'll go from there.

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