First, thanks for the answer

I've put the question here, because the matter was mentioned several times on this forum.
|It's strictly not a necessary change - all ISPs that I know of
|have an SMTP server which is accessible to their dialup
|customers - your roaming workers should just use the local
|SMTP server for outgoing mail.
Well, in Poland we have (basically) one monopolistic Telecom company, and of course a bunch of commercial ISPs.
The ISPs offer the use of their SMTP server (although a majority of them require the sender domain name to be the one hosted by the ISP, so farewell to office-mail-from-home...). They charge a fee however for a dialup account in addition to a normal telephone charge.
On the other hand the Telecom company offers a "free" Internet access (via modem or ISDN). "Free" means no monthly fee of any sort, only the time you spend online charged as an ordinary local call. This is the most popular way of connecting to the 'net at home in Poland. The disadvantage is, that they don't offer anything more (apart from two DNS servers...).
|Nevertheless, POP before SMTP (or authenticated SMTP) is on
|our desired features list.
Happy to hear that

I am not a Linux guru, so I wouldn't like to tamper with the qmail's setup in the e-smith server too much, but I still feel tempted to put up another machine with a second e-smith for experimenting

) Any advice of what I might try? Bruce's 'relay-ctrl' perheaps?...
All the best

Stan