From: Anthony (ant at domain elivefree.net)
Date: Tue 03 Sep 2002 - 01:17:53 IST
Hi David,
I'm still consider myself a newbie so treat the following as
suggestion rather than expert advice. Also forgive me if I happen to
state the obvious. My linux experience is mostly confined to that of a
home user who recently set up a simple mail system for one user.
> I am trying to manage the email for a domain which I have hosted with
> hosting365, and am trying to get the whole email send and receive thing
> working nice and easily.
> At the moment I have configured Fetchmail to poll the different pop3
> mailboxes and deliver the mail accordingly, although it appears that I have
> to have only one unix user being able to receive from each pop3 mailbox.
> This could be a limitation of the fetchmailconf programme,
> It would be much handier if I could just tell it to collect all of the mail
> from the different mailboxes, and then deliver it locally according to the
> "To:" header instead of the pop3 mailbox it came from.
You /could/ use fetchmail to collect the mail from all of the pop3
mailboxes into one local mail account. However the disadvantages of this
are outlined in the "THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP MAILBOXES" section
of the fetchmail man page.
I'd imagine that it would be better to have fetchmail collect mail from
the separate pop3 mailboxes for each of the local users separately as
much as possible. Then use procmail to further process the messages so
that they get delivered to the various mailboxes. Procmail can copy
and forward messages to other (local) users based on the "To:" header -
or in fact the contents of any line in the message. The rules for
the procmailrc configuration file are simple enough and `man procmailex'
should provide enough useful examples to get you started.
Sendmail can be configured to use procmail for delivery. I have to plead
guilty to taking the easy way out as far as configuring sendmail is
concerned. I used the excellent install-sendmail perl script written by
Donncha O Caoimh (available at
http://cork.linux.ie/projects/install-sendmail ).
It makes configuring sendmail really simple. Everything (including
procmail) worked just fine after running his script.
Cheers, Donncha!
> The other issue I am having is sending outgoing mail. I have been trying to
> use sendmail, but am finding it to be an absolute pain in the posterior, and
> when the relay server will only accept outgoing connections if I have
> checked for incoming mail in the last twenty minutes, and I don't know how
> to set sendmail to run a command before it sends out the mail.
Get fetchmail to check for mail every 5 minutes?
Would be the best solution if you're always connected.
Hope this is of some help,
Anthony Geoghegan
-- The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of inhumanity - George Bernard Shaw
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