Re: Emacs Manual: Mail sending via SMTP

[Alex Schroeder]

Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> writes:

>    Emacs includes a package for sending your mail to a SMTP server and
> have it take care of delivering it to the final destination, rather
> than letting the MTA on your local system take care of it.  This can be
> useful if you don't have a MTA set up on your host, or if your machine
> is often disconnected from the Internet.

When I think back to the days when I started using Emacs, then SMTP
and MTA would not have made much sense to me.  How about this
introduction:

   On the Internet, mail is sent from host to host using the simple
mail transfer protocol (SMTP).  When you read and write mail you are
using a mail program that does not use SMTP -- it just reads mails
from files.  This is called a mail user agent (MUA).  The mail
transfer agent (MTA) is the program that accepts mails via SMTP and
stores them in files.  You also need a mail transfer agent when you
send mails.  You mail program has to send its mail to a MTA that can
pass it on using SMTP.

   Emacs includes a package for sending your mail to a SMTP server and
have it take care of delivering it to the final destination, rather
than letting the MTA on your local system take care of it.  ...

Alex.