Re: smtp outlook.com

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

xiewensheng@gmail.com writes:

> Hi, I have similar problem.
> Fetching imap email is ok, but sending smtp email is not.
>
> I am working under windows + Emacs/gnus + gnutls.
>
> Have you solved the problem?

Well, I’ve got a registration at outlook.com purposefully to test it
with Gnus — and it just works with no problem.  I’ve used the following
configuration:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
(setq send-mail-function 'smtpmail-send-it
      message-send-mail-function send-mail-function
      smtpmail-default-smtp-server "smtp-mail.outlook.com"
      smtpmail-smtp-service 587
      smtpmail-smtp-user "example@outlook.com")
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

and the following .authinfo:

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
machine smtp-mail.outlook.com login example@outlook.com password eXamp1e port 
587
--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

Debian GNU/Linux Jessie, GnuTLS 3.3.8, GNU Emacs 25.1.50.


However, it was enough to send two letters through this SMTP server to
get enough experience to never deal with it again.  Look:

— It adds erroneous headers, for example ‘Content-Language: en-US’,
  while my test message was not in English.

— It does not allow you to write anything to ‘From’ header even outside
  of angle brackets, e. g. I am not allowed to write my name as ‘Дмитрий
  Александров <example@outlook.com>’ — it would be silently rewritten
  with ‘Dmitry Alexandrov <example@outlook.com>’.

— It rewrites ‘Message-ID’, which means that unambiguous link between you
  letter and replies to it would be lost for your MUA (if only you do
  not ‘Bcc’ all outcoming mail to yourself).

— It just throw out useful headers, in particular ‘Mail-Followup-To’
  and ‘Mail-Copies-To’.

As a bonus, it adds lots of weird headers and re-encodes the body of
message — both charset and transfer encoding: I’ve send a letter with
‘charset="utf-8"’ and received with ‘charset="iso-8859-1"’, I’ve send a
letter in ‘8bit’ encoding and received it in ‘base64’.

Any of listed ‘features’ on its own should be enough to not to use that
piece of Microsoft crap.  Thus, I would just advice you choose another
SMTP server that does not break you mail.