MFsmtp motivations

History:
A quick n dirty history of jwSMTP [renamed to MFsmtp]: I was interested in making my home network accessible through my firewall. I had one of those little blue boxes with a web interface to control it. Didn’t want to use ddns as at the time I did not have a domain name anyway. So I decided to have a program run on one of my servers that contacted the router parsed the data in it’s data section and send out the router’s public IP address to an email of my choosing. This was how the library was born.
Two problems basically had to be solved (with regard to the email part of the program): get the MX record of the server to send to and send the mail to this server. I started with a hard coded routine to just send to an SMTP server as this was the easiest part to code. Once that was up I set about coding the DNS part of the problem. A lot of sending packets to DNS servers to see if I understood what dns does and voila I had the two parts I needed. I realized after the program was written that the code was a really simple drop in for email send services in a program, so I ripped out that part of the code and turned it into a library which I released under the GPL.

This has now been renamed and re-licensed to BSD 3-Clause License as of version 2.03.1

April 2002 was the first sourceforge release.