Re: fetchmail multidrop problem

[Joe <joe@jretrading.com>]

Marco Scholten wrote:
> hello,
>
> I am trying to fetch mail from out ISP and divide it on our lan to the 
> correct users.
> We have only 1 mailbox with several aliases.
>
> mail to e.fox@ourdomain.nl should go to els
> mail to j.jansen@ourdomain.nl should go to jan
> mail to th.jansen@ourdomain.nl should go to theo
> mail to info@domain.nl should go to els and jan
>
> After several days of reading man pages and googling i still haven't 
> been succesfull.
>
> what i have done so far
> -installed fetchmail
> -installed exim4 and configured it to send using smarthost and receive 
> using fetchmail
> -configured outlook express on client machines.
>
> .fetchmailrc:
>
> set postmaster "jan"
> set no bouncemail
> set no spambounce
> set properties ""
> poll smtp.ourisp.nl with proto POP3 interval 300
>    aka ourisp.nl localdomains ourdomain.nl
>       user 'jan' there with password 'secret' to j.jansen=jan e.fox=els 
> th.jansen=theo here options keep
>
> All messages now go to the postmaster, when i send a mail to 
> th.jansen@ourdomain.nl then fetchmail gives an error 'unknown user'.
> When i send a mail to theo using 'echo "test" | mail -s "testmsg" theo' 
> then it is received ok on the client machine.
>
> i have tried running fetchmail as root and as user, results are the same.
>
> I do not understand the relation between the various programs involved 
> in this very well.
> Can anyone please point me in the right direction?

Two points: Outlook and Outlook Express will collect mail by POP3 or
(preferably) IMAP. You will need one or the other (most implementations
provide both) and you don't mention using either. Most IMAP servers
(e.g. Courier) will require exim to use maildir format rather than mbox.
This is a single configuration, in transports I think.

Also, I would use fetchmail only for downloading, and use exim to do
name translation. The /etc/aliases file is the place to put these. I'm
not sure if aliases can be used to send to multiple users, but there is
at least one explicit way in exim to do that.

Fetchmail will certainly collect for multiple users without running
as root, and the configuration file must be /etc/fetchmailrc. I'm
not sure from your post if you know this.

I'm sorry I can't give you a step-by-step, but my current mail system
is not similar to this, and I would only offer exact information about
something I actually have running myself.

I have run fetchmail/exim/Courier systems on Debian in the past, so I
do know it can be done.