Re: Lightweight alternative MTA? [was: Re: Starting MTA:]
Hi Osamu,
Thanks for the response. I really don't get it when it comes to mail.
MTA/MDA/MUA are kind of confusing, if you know where I can find a 2 page
explanation of email I'd really like to read it.
I use /usr/bin/mail, mutt, fetchmail and exim4.
The man page for /usr/bin/mail claims it's a "mail processing system".
Mutt is an MUA.
Fetchmail's man page claims, 'mail-retrieval and forwarding utility'.
Exim4's manpage claims it's an MTA, but fetchmail's manpage refers to
exim as an MDA.
How does /usr/bin/mail know to put outbound mail in /var/spool/exim4/input?
I killed the exim daemon and mail still puts mail in .../exim4/input
even though 'exim4/input' doesn't appear in any file in /etc/ or
root's environment.
> > When I tried this and the mail stopped getting delivered until I
> > restored /etc/default/exim4.
>
> Are you talking about delivering to external hosts?
No, rather fetchmail failed since there was no connection on port 25.
> Sure, that what you did unless you run some explicit command, cron script or hook script.
Would you restate this another way? I'm not understanding it.
>
> daemon has 2 functionalities:
> (1) listening to port 25 (SMTP) to get connected from external hosts.
> (2) pushing out queued messages to hosts.
>
> You certainly do not need (1)
OK, fetchmail's manpage gives examples for connecting directly to procmail
and sendmail but not exim and exim4's 30 page/60 screen manpage said nothing
about it's return value on disk full and I didn't see anything to suggest
how to take input directly from fetchmail.
Further exploration shows that sendmail is actually a link to exim so
I guess that would work but I saw in another thread that cron's messages
won't get delivered if there's no MTA deamon running. True?
> but you still need to do (2) if you wish
> to send mail to external host via local mail system like exim or
> postfix. (If you configure MUA to connect to external MTA directly this
> is not issue.)
>
> Simple fix is to use queueonly or ppp instead. (Since you are dialup,
> ppp is more suitable to save fee.)
OK I set QUEUERUNNER='ppp' and the mail went out but there is still
an exim deamon running, not sure how that helped.
>
> As I think of this for mutt, it may be easier to create shell script
> which runs "exim -q" or postfix's equivalent command when mutt
> terminates or receive SIGTERM etc.
>
>
> Please note that we are talking laptop type use case.
How would this differ from a desktop on dialup?
>
> * /usr/sbin/sendmail is available and it can work with /etc/aliases.
> * log daemon may send some mail but to local user
> * send messages via smarthost with
> - the message submission port (587) or
> - SMTP/SSL port (465)
> * receive messages via ISP using getmail or fetchmail with
> - POP3 (110) or
> - TLS/POP3 port (995).
>
> Quite likely, you have cron or daemon doing POP3. I use cron to run
> getmail every 15 min when IP connection is active. I could stop exim
> and run it from similar script.
>
<snip>
No, I just have a script that connects if not already connected
then runs exim4 -qqff and fetchmail then shuts down the connection
if it opened it.
Thanks aagin,
Mike
--
Satisfied user of Linux since 1997.
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