Re: mail sorting tool

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2001 at 03:29:22PM +0100, Robert Waldner wrote:
> On Wed, 03 Jan 2001 15:21:56 +0100, Stephane Bortzmeyer writes:
> >On Wednesday 3 January 2001, at 15 h 15, the keyboard of Robert Waldner 
> ><Waldner@KPNQwest.at> wrote:
> >
> >> make your local mailer (sendmail, exim, whatever) feeling
> >> "responsible" for the domain and simply use fetchmail to pop the
> >> mails
> >
> >This needs an account on the ISP's machine for every local
> >user. Inconvenient.
>
> Uh, why? As far as I understood, Martin has _one_ POP-account
> (domain-in-a-box this feature is called by us) with his ISP.

because POP is not a mail transport protocol. it's not designed to be
one, and can not even be reliably kludged to act like one.

when a message is delivered to a mailbox account, the envelope adress
(RCPT TO:) is lost unless the MTA records it in another header (such
as X-Envelope-To:) - most don't, and there's no standard for doing so.
Even where it is done, it either a) subverts privacy by exposing BCC
addresses or b) duplicates incoming messages so that there is one copy
per envelope recipient.

why reinvent the wheel when there's a perfectly adequate tool designed
to do the job which has been used and tested for many years? uucp is the
right tool for the job of delivering mail to a mail server which has a
dynamic IP address. this job is one of the things that uucp was designed
to do - unlike POP, it does not lose the envelope address information.

while uucp works best on unix, there are uucp programs for other
operating systems...including one for windows called mailcoach
(www.mailcoach.com) which was brought to my attention recently - i've
never used it (and likely never will use it because i don't do NT), but
it sounds good from the description on the web site.

> He now can use fetchmail to get the mails, and fetchmail will deliver 
>  it to localhost:25, no matter what?s in From, To, Cc, whereever. Only 
>  one account needed.

the To: and CC: headers are irrelevant to mail delivery. what matters is
the envelope recipient address. the most obvious example of this is the
BCC header (as used by most mailing lists).

> The only problem with a setup like this is, that it?s exploitable by 

the "only problem" with it is that it does not and can not work reliably.

craig

--
craig sanders