Re: Some minor mail problems w/ Debian 2.2
Glyn Millington wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 08, 2000 at 01:29:38PM +0400, thus spake Rino Mardo:
> > > > hmm, fetchmail uses ETRN and not SMTP (port 25). debian 2.2 with exim
> > works
> > > > fine out of the box
> > > > so why compound the problem? what is it your trying to accomplish?
> >
> > yes by default SMTP uses port 25. um, what's the problem anyway?
>
> Well there appear to be two problems! One is answered here
>
> #man fetchmail .....................
>
> "fetches mail from remote mailservers and forwards it to
> your local (client) machine's delivery system.....
>
> The fetchmail program can gather mail from servers sup
> porting any of the common mail-retrieval protocols: POP2,
> POP3, IMAP2bis, IMAP4, and IMAPrev1. It can also use the
> ESMTP ETRN extension. (The RFCs describing all these pro
> tocols are listed at the end of this manual page.)
>
> While fetchmail is primarily intended to be used over on-
> demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections), it
> may also be useful as a message transfer agent for sites
> which refuse for security reasons to permit (sender-initi
> ated) SMTP transactions with sendmail.
>
> As each message is retrieved fetchmail normally delivers
> it via SMTP to port 25 on the machine it is running on
> (localhost), just as though it were being passed in over a
> normal TCP/IP link. The mail will then be delivered
> locally via your system's MDA (Mail Delivery Agent, usu
> ally sendmail(8) but your system may use a different one
> such as smail, mmdf, exim, or qmail). All the delivery-
> control mechanisms (such as .forward files) normally
> available through your system MDA and local delivery
> agents will therefore work.
>
> The other problem is with the question - what is he trying to
> acheive??
>
> A bit like life really......
>
> Peace!
>
> Glyn M
>
> --
> ******************************************************
> * "The soul is greater than the hum of its parts. " *
> * Douglas Hoftstatder *
> ******************************************************
>
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Well, sorry folks, for being tardy on getting back with you. I found out the hard
way that the Debian Install Guide wasn't kidding about /etc (among other things)
being pretty much the property of dselect/apt/dpkg, etc. I had been farting around
w/ exim, sendmail, masqmail, postfix, etc., and noticed that when I had masqmail
installed, there were a _lot_ of files in /etc/ and /var/ that belonged to postfix
and exim, even when they weren't installed. Well, I'll just rm those suckers.
Whoops. Not a good idea. I later reinstalled postfix, and debconf errored out,
cause those files weren't there. Same w/ exim. Well, rather than dink around
trying to figure out what package _did_ install those files, since the MTA they went
to obviously didn't, and since I didn't have a lot of time and effort sunk into my
system yet, I opted to take another tour thru the lovely Debian installation program
;). Except I forgot that I actually had some useful stuff on my /home partition, and
wiped it. :( So I am pretty much lost my whole archive of messages from all the
mailing lists I follow. Talk about getting your fingers rapped! Ouch!!
Well, now that I have my mail kinda sorta operational again, using Communicator, here
is some answers to some of the issues/questions you kind folks have asked:
I used to use sendmail plus a script called install-sendmail to set up sendmail &
fetchmail, to retrieve my mail from Yahoo!, and send new mail w/ the headers written
properly as being from milanuk@yahoo.com (Netscape by itself, even w/
'milanuk@yahoo.com' in the From: field in Preferences, would pop up
'monte@ishamael.inet' in one of the mail fields, which would cause someone's spam
filter on the SuSE list to kick in, and some other people just plain got irate. So I
used the script, sendmail, and fetchmail instead. Quick, simple, painless).
Unfortunately, the Debian install of sendmail doesn't seem to jive w/ the
install-sendmail script, so that rules out sendmail, as I am _not_ masochistic enough
to want to configure that critter otherwise. Exim would work fine, I guess, but I
was initially having a bit of trouble (I guess I still am) figuring out _exactly_
what I need to change where, for my situation: essentially a home dialup system, w/ a
local username different from the username on my mail account. Postfix does seem to
have a fair bit of documentation that addresses that specifically, so I'll probably
pursue that next. The problem I think I had w/ fetchmail not being able to deliver
to the localhost smtp port was w/ masqmail, not exim. Masqmail is the other finalist
for my situation, at least as I currently see it: it is a simple, lightweight MTA,
which is pretty much designed for almost my exact situation. I can figure out most
of the config needed for my situation, but like I said, it didn't seem to want to
receive mail on port 25 from fetchmail.
Also, one other odd requirement I have: pop-before-smtp authentication. Before, I
would just add a line to the end of my .fetchmailrc like this:
postconnect "/usr/sbin/sendmail -q"
Which would run sendmail to deliver remote queued mail right after fetchmail
finished, while the pop3 login was still valid. I need to be able to do something
similar w/ whatever I choose now.
As far as Yahoo!'s mail server, I am not sure what it runs, but it is kinda flaky,
and their support staff has thus far refused to respond to any requests for help or
information. I had a deal where I was gone for a while, and didn't have my procmail
duplicate nuker in effect, and I started fetchmail in daemon mode overnight to
download a buttload of messages that had accumulated while I was away -- something
like a 1000 or so. When I checked the mail box the next night, I had something like
13,000+ messages in my mail folder, and about 1100 still on Yahoo! Somewhere around
400 messages, the Yahoo! server gets fubar and resets the connection. It takes
'fetchmail -avFK -b 100' to get the job done. This fetchs all, forces a flush,
forces nokeep, and tears down and rebuilds the smtp connection every 100 messages
received. (Note=this doesn't work on ETRN). So there you go. If there is anything
else I can clear up, post away.
Thanks for your time,
Monte
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