Re: technical mail setup question (and a little of what was: calling Philip Hands)
On Thu, 3 Jun 1999, Kevin Turner wrote:
> In my head, a hypothetical ISP wrote:
> > Hypothetical angry-user wrote:
> > >
> > > Trust your Internet mail-senders, then.
> >
> > You are awfully free with how our system resources are spent, aren't
> > you? We only charge $14.95 a month-- we literally CANNOT AFFORD the
> > extra costs in more elaborate spam-pervention. If you can show me
> > another program with the same low costs (of maintance) that this one
> > does, or are willing to supply the extra resources, fine-- we'll use
> > it. But for now we're going to stick with this one -- even if it
> > isn't perfect -- because getting spammed isn't an option for us.
>
> Okay. Enough feeding the silly flame-beasts. I'd like to direct your
> attention now (especially those of you advocating using your isp's
> relay.) to a very real technical question in debian-user (please
> follow-up to his question there):
>
> Allan M. Wind has a local LAN, I have a dynamic IP, both of us have the
> problem that the hostname that our local Sendmail is telling our ISP's
> SMTP relays is not a resolvable hostname. The relay declines to do the
> transaction. Solution?
>
> Because of the necessity (demonstrated in the above thread) of using a
> relay, and what I imagine must be a prevailance of dialup, dynamic-ip
> using users in the linux user base, this must be a *very easy* problem
> to solve upon installation. In fact, it shouldn't /be/ a problem at
> all. How can we work to make sure this is so? It's certainly not
> advisable to change the system hostname on every ppp/ip-up (believe
> me... I tried it last summer ;)
>
> Thanks for your productive efforts in making Debian a better place,
> - Kevin Turner
My machine is provided a fixed IP address from my ISP (dwarf.polaris.net)
which is only resolvable when my machine is connected. As a result, I use
the e-mail account my ISP provides (dwarf@polaris.net) and configure pine
to use that address in the From field. I use popclient (yes, I know, but
fetchmail doesn't do what I need) to retrieve my mail from my ISP dialup
account and read it from my machine when time permits.
I manage a separate account (on another server not connected with my ISP)
where I reply to the support questions from my book. The account on my
machine (debiansupport) that manages this task is configured to provide
the from address "debian-support@linuxpress.com", and uses the smtp server
provided by my publisher's ISP. This returns all replies to that account
where I can pop down that mail into the debiansupport account for reading
and answers. I believe that this process could be used to provide accounts
for multiple nodes on a LAN through a common provider, even using the
common provider's local mail server, as long as each node on the LAN has a
valid e-mail account on a server exterior to the LAN. If the gateway (the
node dialing up the ISP) is a perminant one, providing a relay server on
the gateway that could recieve mail for the various accounts on the LAN
should be a functional solution as well.
This is just my simplistic solution to the problem. I'm sure there are
other, more comprehensive solutions.
Luck,
Dwarf
--
_-_-_-_-_- Author of "The Debian Linux User's Guide" _-_-_-_-_-_-
aka Dale Scheetz Phone: 1 (850) 656-9769
Flexible Software 11000 McCrackin Road
e-mail: dwarf@polaris.net Tallahassee, FL 32308
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