Question

I have a SMTP server that needs to authenticate with extended smtp (esmtp) and i can’t find a way to make my rails app to authenticate with EHLO instead of HELO.

any ideas ?

Answer 1

Are you sure that Rails isn’t already doing this? Digging through the source, Rails delegates to the Mail gem which delegates to Net::SMTP. If you look at the Ruby source for lib/net/smtp.rb, you’ll see that at some point it calls a private do_helo method which checks the @esmtp variable and if true, does ehlo instead of helo. Looking back up at the initialize, it sets @esmtp to true by default. I don’t see anywhere that it’s getting unset.

Perhaps it’s something else?

For the reference do_helo in Net::SMTP

def do_helo(helodomain)
   begin
     if @esmtp
       ehlo helodomain
     else
       helo helodomain
     end
   rescue Net::ProtocolError
     if @esmtp
       @esmtp = false
       @error_occured = false
       retry
     end
     raise
   end
end