Re: smail

[Remco Blaakmeer <remco@blaakmeer.student.utwente.nl>]

On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Daniel Martin wrote:

> On Wed, 19 Nov 1997, Gerald Livingston wrote:
> 
> > 
> >   If I can find a sucker -- errr -- nice person to host for me, would 
> > it be possible for me to set up a MX on someone's system such as 
> > force-1.xxx.com and have mail addressed to gvl@force-1.xxx.com be 
> > held on the host system until it is somehow recognized that I am 
> > online so SMTP delivery to smail can occur?
> 
> Hmmm.... this could be tricky - you'd need some way to notify the nice
> person with the DNS machine that you'd gone offline - otherwise, how would
> they be able to know that they were delivering mail to your machine, and
> not to some other box that had dialed up recently and taken the DNS
> address you used to have?  A bit of a tricky problem, I think - the only
> solutions I can think of are a bit messy.

One solution that pops up on me is to get a pop3 account on the host and
use fetchmail. But you can most likely do that with your isp, too. I think
you should not let people send e-mail directly to your box if you are not
on a permanent connection with a computer switched on 24/7. fetchmail can
run as a daemon and check mail at regular intervals. I think this would be
an interesting option in this case. I am sure the 'go online' script can
also start fetchmail for different users [1] and the 'go offline' script
can kill all fetchmail daemons running.

Remco

[1] you probably want to use something like
( sleep 10 ; su username -c 'fetchmail --daemon 900 --all --syslog' ) &
in the script, assuming the script runs as root. Note that I have not
tested this. I have absolutely no experience with Linux on dialup lines,
but I do use fetchmail.


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