GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

SMTP Direct

You can talk directly to an SMTP server, for example to test that it actually works for you. Here's a sample interaction. The commands don't need to be uppercase -- they are here just to make the commands obvious.

$ telnet mailhost.act.togaware.com 25
Trying 105.83.2.11... 
Connected to mailhost.act.togaware.com. 
Escape character is '^]'. 
220 mailhost.act.togaware.com ESMTP Postfix
helo modern.act.togaware.com
250 mailhost.act.togaware.com
mail from: [email protected]
250 Ok
RCPT TO: [email protected]
250 Ok
DATA
354 End data with <CR><LF>.<CR><LF>
Subject: Testing manually through telnet to mailhost
 
This is the body
. 
250 Ok: queued as 42DDE139919
QUIT
221 Bye
Connection closed by foreign host.

The EHLO localhost command will list the capabilities of the server.