Infralution Support

[dcvchicago]

My web host is migrating all accounts to a new email system with SMTP authentication. I don't see a setting for an SMTP user name and password in the IPN.NET Settings.xml file. How will IPN.NET connect to my site's SMTP without those settings?

And now that I think of it, my web host's current email system implements 'POP-before-SMTP' security, which requires a login to the POP account before connecting to the SMTP account. Yet IPN.NET appears to be connecting to my web host SMTP server when it (IPN.NET) is running on my development machine. How does that work?

Needless to say, this stuff has me concerned about the security of my SMTP account. I assume I'm missing something. Can you shed some light? Thanks

[Infralution]

Our experience has been that web hosts generally don't require SMTP authentication to send email from within their network (ie web pages they host). However, it would be relatively easy to add authentication by modifying the SendEmail function in the source code if you require this. Please let us know it you do end up needing this as we will look at modifying the core product to support it.
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Infralution Support

[dcvchicago]

Thanks! My current web host (DiscountASP.NET) said they aren't going to require SMTP authentication to send mail from within their network (from one web host account through another web host account's SMTP). So IPN.NET should be able to run on the production server as-is.

But if I'm testing IPN.NET on my local development machine, and having it send email from my main site, then it's accessing DiscountASP.NET's servers from outside the network--so I think it would need to authenticate.

I would recommend authentication as a good modification to the core product, since more hosts seem to be going in that direction. We may not need it in production mode, but it would make life easier while developing and testing on the local server.

[Infralution]

OK - we'll look at providing support for this in our next release.
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Infralution Support

[Infralution]

We've now added support for SMTP authentication in release 1.0.2 which is now available for download. Note that we only recommend using the SMTP authentication for local testing - since including the SMTP password in either code or the Settings.xml file on a public server poses a potential security risk.
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Infralution Support

[dcvchicago]

Thanks--my web host just switched to SMTP authentication, so this will definitely make local testing easier.