Another perfectly good theory shot to hell. I sent the program
'socket' to Alan Larson. This is a program that just opens a socket
connection and attaches it to stdin/out. So you can't blame this on
telnet:
> I can send you source for a little program called 'socket' which gives
> you a connection to any socket from your tty. It was posted to
> comp.sources sometime back. If you want I'd like to send it to you so
> you can see if indeed the problem you saw was due to telnet.
I tried the program. Here are the results. As you can see, they
are exactly the same as the unix telnet program.
loren:1707% date ; socket -c flyhalf.ctd.comsat.com smtp ; date
Wed Apr 24 11:37:25 PDT 1996
421 flyhalf.ctd.comsat.com: SMTP command timeout - closing connection.
Wed Apr 24 11:42:28 PDT 1996
loren:1708%
It still looks like a 5 minute timeout before you close the connection
when I sent nothing at all. Notice that the 220 message never came.
Alan