Re: exim appropriate for dial-up?
On Sat, Jan 22, 2000 at 01:51:47PM -0800, Ross Boylan wrote:
<snipped>
> With all that I decided maybe I should take a closer look at the manuals.
> The 3.10 manual (direct from exim.org), chapter 41, p. 212 says
> Exim was designed for use on permanently connected hosts, and so is not
> particularly well
> suited to use in sn intermittenly connected environment.
>
> In view of this, is exim the right choice in such a setting? What is the
> alternative?
>
> Setting up mail on debian seems very complicated compared to the usual
> process on Windows, where you simply configure a client with a few
> parameters. It seems here you have a client and a transport agent to
> configure. After spending some time with the manual, it remains a mystery
> to me how one gets exim to send the mail to the permanently connected host
> (the ISP), or get it from there. Retreiving mail uses POP, and there is no
> reference to POP in the exim manual as far as I can tell.
Use fetchmail to retrieve mail from the server.
> I just found the following relevant Linux How-To:
> http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/ISP-Hookup-HOWTO-4.html
> I'm not sure how relevant it is to Debian. Since exim is a "drop-in"
> replacement for sendmail, I expect the commands they give there should work
> for exim too...
I'm on a dial-up ISP here and am using exim quite happily. The system
here is running potato, kernel 2.2.13, exim 3.11, and fetchmail 5.2.3
With all the lists I'm on I average probably 250 to 300 emails per day, and
the combo listed above handles it quite nicely. I wrote a small shell script
to manage the downloading of my email. cron runs that script a couple times
a day, and whenever I'm logged in that script fires up fetchmail in daemon
mode, checking the server every two minutes, and killing the daemon when I
log out.
One caveat is that my connection to our ISP is handled by a demand dialing
router seperate from this box. However, any sort of demand dialing
connection should be sufficient. For that there is diald or the demand
option to pppd.
If you want more details let me know and I'll send you all of the relevant
config files and scripts - they're big enough that they probably shouldn't
be sent to the list as a whole. I can't guarantee that everything in my
config files is 100% proper and correct - but it all works for me.
--
Mike Werner KA8YSD | "Where do you want to go today?"
ICQ# 12934898 | "As far from Redmond as possible!"
'91 GS500E |
Morgantown WV | Only dead fish go with the flow.
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