I'm indebted to Debian Administration for alerting me to a tool which would have saved me a huge amount of time if I'd known of its existence earlier, namely swaks, an SMTP transaction tester. Ever get sick to death of typing and retyping an SMTP conversation into a malfunctioning mail server? Then swaks is for you, it takes all the boring, repetitive SMTP conversations out of the equation by automating it for you and displaying the results to the command line. Hooray!
Man page here.
Man page here.
