Re: Easiest Way to forward an email Message from Linux to a Mac

["Rick Thomas" <rick.thomas@pobox.com>]

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019, at 10:25 PM, elvis wrote:

On 3/11/19 1:50 pm, Rick Thomas wrote:

See reply bottom posted...

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019, at 10:17 AM, Bob Weber wrote:

On 11/2/19 8:10 AM, Martin McCormick wrote:

Here is the setup.  We are on a private vlan as in 192.168.x.x.
All local host names are resolved via hosts files.  Messages to
go to the big wide world must go through Suddenlink's SMTP
smarthost and I definitely don't want to break that.

	On rare occasions, I want to forward an email to the Mac
which normally doesn't send or receive emails.  What would be the
simplest way to "forward" an email from the Linux box to the
Mac's mailer?

	The Mac only needs to be able to receive, not send any
email.

Thank you

Martin WB5AGZ

Why not create a user on the Linux box to receive such emails and have the MAC client connect to that user on the Linux box.  You might have to install a pop server (popa3d ... easiest to install and configure) or imac server (dovecot-imapd ... harder to configure and probably more than you need) on the Linux box if one isn't installed already. 

Your MAC would have to have an email client capable of connecting to a pop or imac mailbox at the ip of the Linux box or host name in the hosts file corresponding to the Linux box.

Hi Martin,

The setup Bob describes is exactly what I use for my family.  Debian linux box running dovecot receives email from our ISP via "fetchmail" and sorts it out to separate accounts for each family member, who then reads their mail on a Mac or PC using the native OS gui mail-reader on their machine.

Feel free to ask me if you have any questions.

Hi Rick,

Why doesn't each user use the native reader to get the mail from the ISP? What is the reason for the extra step?

I've never been able to quite figure out where I would need fetchmail in my mail setup but every howto seems to mention it, so I am curious to see if I am missing something.

The local mail server is inside the firewall, so it's a bit more private than the ISP.  Also, the local machine keeps archives that the ISP would charge money for.  It sorts into folders and does other automated activities that are not available from the ISP.  The main benefit is that this setup gives us finer grained control than we can get from the ISP.

Fetchmail allows me (via cron) to schedule precisely when mail is retrieved from the ISP.  Also, the connection starts from inside the firewall, so I don't have to poke a hole in the firewall for SMTP to reach in and deliver mail.

It's a trade-off of simplicity vs control.

HopeThatHelps

Rick