Re: [exim/fetchmail] A day in the life of an email
Hello,
Just one minor comment, since others seem to be handling the query...
> Mark Phillips wrote:
...
> > 3. Fetchmail feeds this email into some black box (I don't understand
> > this bit - is it a file or is it a program that is sitting around
> > waiting for such events???).
...
> There is no black box. Fetchmail communicates directly with exim thru
> port 25 using the SMTP protocol.
Actually, there's another way you can hand a message to exim, and that is
by invoking it directly, as /usr/sbin/exim (or /usr/sbin/sendmail).
You can configure fetchmail to use either method.
BTW, you might need to configure exim to accept invalid sender addresses
from fetchmail, but I've forgotten how I did that.
> > 5. I then decide to send a message to fred@banana.com. I compose an
> > email in pine which puts the message in the "black box" talked about
> > above.
...
> As above, pine will communicate directly with port 25 or your local
> machine and talk to exim.
I would suspect that most programs would call /usr/sbin/sendmail, because
that's a lot easier to do. Certainly elm has that filename hard-coded into
it, and so does mutt.
/usr/sbin/sendmail is another name for exim, which then does whatever it's
supposed to with the message - typically, it'll either write it to
someone's mailbox, telnet 25 to another host, or write it into its private
area to deal with it later.
HTH
Jiri <jiri@baum.com.au>
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