Larry, On 20 Sep 2011, at 02:13, Larry White wrote:
Hi,
I'm looking for a way to send email using SSL.
There is no ready out-of-the-box solution for this (yet), as far as I know.
Googling I've found several conversations from earlier this year on the subject, including one thread from May and another from January. In the May thread it sounded like a project was getting kicked off to do something that might be official-ish. Has there been progress on this?
Yes, there is a project called Zodiac that reimplements socketstream and adds secure (SSL) socket streams. These are then used for HTTPS. I think they should also work for sending email over SSL. At the moment Zodiac is still in development, if you are interested, see my messages to the Pharo dev list. Some people have used local tunneling (http -> https) using stunnel as a way around this problem.
Second question, while playing with mail in my pharo image, the entire image seems to block during the handshake/send. Is there a way around that? If not, would a solution perhaps be to run a separate image to send emails and communicate via a db or file system?
Final question, does Pharo always block on IO? My impression was that all Smalltalks did at one time, but that some (visualworks? squeak?) had fixed that years ago.
Pharo typically blocks when the main or UI thread is doing something, which includes IO. You can perfectly do all kinds of things in other threads. Check the process monitor or try some multithreaded server. HTH, Sven