Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:
It's not mutt's job, or any MUA's job, to handle queueing and multiple delivery attempts for mail. An MUA should hand the mail to an MTA and forget about it. The MTA will queue the mail and attempt delivery as many times as it takes until it either succeeds or the delivery times out (in which case it will bounce it back to the sender with an "unable to deliver" message).
I think you might be confused, I wasn't talking about contacting the destination SMTP server directly, I was talking about contacting a remote authenticated queuing SMTP server directly. Like it or not it is common practise to do this directly from the MUA. This offers advantages such as being able to enter the remote SMTP password when sending the email instead of saving it on disk (not that many people do this...) msmtp is interesting implementation of sendmail, because it lets individual users store their remote smtp servers in ~/.msmtprc.
mutt's SMTP capability is best used with a smart-host (either the localhost or elsewhere on the local network), not for direct delivery to the final destination host. ditto for any other MUA.
That is what I was talking about. Unfortunately, I have had this session to the smart host fail, and lost outgoing emails as a result. -- Brian May <brian@linuxpenguins.xyz> https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/