[erlang-questions] Erlang SMTP Client?

[Richard Carlsson]

On 10/10/2011 11:30 PM, David Mercer wrote:
> On Monday, October 10, 2011, Andrew Thompson wrote:
>
>> I'm the author and maintainer of (in my biased view) the most complete
>> SMTP library for erlang, gen_smtp:
>>
>> https://github.com/Vagabond/gen_smtp
>>
>> gen_smtp includes both a SMTP client, and a callback framework for
>> writing SMTP servers. It's part of several other erlang projects now,
>> including Zotonic and Chicago Boss.
>
> Thanks.  That worked fine out of the box.  I must admit, I am surprised
> there is no SMTP client in the standard distribution.  You would think that
> would be a fairly common communication protocol...

Often, what you want is more than just SMTP. If there are some network 
issues (or your mail server is simply down) at the time your program 
tries to send the mail, you usually want your program to still be able 
to regard the mail as sent and carry on. This means that the mail needs 
to be persistently stored on disk in a spool area and that the MTA 
regularly tries to send any outgoing mail that's been spooled, so it 
will eventually be on its way once the problem is resolved. That's why 
we like to rely on sendmail instead. But it all depends on the needs of 
your application.

    /Richard