SMTPPROX(1)

✨ SMTPPROX(1) ✨

so bestie, you opened the General Commands Manual and landed on the page for smtpprox 💖 pull up a chair, this one's short and honestly kind of iconic.

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🌸 NAME 🌸

smtpprox — a trivial transparent SMTP proxy. that's the whole name section. short, sweet, slays 💅

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🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

smtpprox [options] listen.addr:port talk.addr:port

like… you give it where to listen, you give it where to talk, and it does the thing. listen.addr:port and talk.addr:port, in that order, no cap 🫶

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💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so first things first: this manual page only documents the smtpprox command briefly. it's a vibe check, not a whole dissertation, got it? 🎀

now the actual tea: smtpprox is a trivial transparent SMTP proxy — and the way that works is it's literally an SMTP server and client combination wearing a trenchcoat. one side catches the mail, the other side hands it off. 🧚

and here's the part that's lowkey genius: it uses its own SMTP server and client modules, and those modules are designed so that every single step of the protocol dialogue gets exposed to the calling program. every. step. 👑

why do we care?? because that gives you the greatest flexibility when you wanna hook in envelope and content controls and scanning. you're not fighting the library, bestie — the library is handing you the receipts. 💅✨

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

OPTIONS

(no fr, the original lists the OPTIONS heading twice and I'm not about to erase history. two headings, one girl. 💀)

• --children=N — how many child processes you want chillin' in the service pool. and listen: each child doesn't live forever, it dips out after servicing a random number of messages somewhere between minperchild and maxperchild. [default 16]
• --minperchild=N — the minimum number of messages a child process will service before it's done. [default 100]
• --maxperchild=N — the maximum number of messages a child process will service. [default 200]
• --debugtrace=filename_prefix — okay so if you pass debugtrace, that prefix gets the PID appended to it, which gives you a separate logfile for each child 🎀. and what goes in there? all the SMTP dialogues that child services. it looks like a snooper sitting on the client side of the proxy. ngl, it's giving surveillance but make it helpful. 🙈

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🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

smtpprox was written by Bennett Todd, bet@rahul.net. 👑

this manual page was written by Jesse Norell <jesse@kci.net>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others). 🫶

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! this cutie came out of the GNUj source, dated 2012-12-11, and it lives at SMTPPROX(1) in the manual — go forth and proxy transparently 💖✨🌸