It looks like fetchmail MAY save my bacon for a email backup system,
but from the docs I'm still not sure if this is the case or how I'd
do it. I think I might not be that strange a Linux user so I'm hoping
that this problem has been solved.
First, the current situation:
I've signed up with an ISP (Speakeasy) that is very helpful for users
who want to run their own servers. I own the domain geekster.com and
they host the DNS records for me. I run my own sendmail server through
the DSL connection (machine name home.geekster.com). When I asked them
about doing this, they added their own email server (think it's running
qmail) as a backup MX record for the geekster.com domain. They said
that in case of a DSLor home server outage that their
server (eve.speakeasy.org) would queue up the email sent to ANY user at
the geekster.com domain for up to 12 hours and then send it to my own
sendmail server when the connection came back up. I'd have redundancy
with no effort or configuration at all. It has worked great for the
few small outages I've had.
Until Friday. My DSL went down and it sounds like it's going to be a
while. I know their server is getting the email, but then returning
it after 12 hours and I'm not getting it. My linux box can dial in,
but since it gets a dynamic IP their email server can't spool it to me
properly.
What I thought might work is if I ask them to instead of queuing it up
to be sent to my server (which won't work for a few days), could I ask
them to dump email sent to any userid at geekster.com to a single POP
account, then use fetchmail to get it from there and feed it to my
local sendmail as if their server had forwarded it to me, so my local
sendmail aliases and accounts would all get their email? Email sent
from my local machines would not be affected at all since I just use
speakeasy's smtp server. The incoming email would be entirely sorted
for delivery by the to: address in the email, not the from: address
or anything fancy. When my DSL comes back up the MX records would point
incoming mail right to my own server and they wouldn't go through
speakeasy's server at all until the next outage.
In reading the docs:
Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. We don't really recommend
this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header information.
ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)
I don't know if this applies to me or not or really understand the
warning because it sounds exactly like I want to go from POP to SMTP.
Does this apply to me?
Would you be so kind as to give me a sample fetchmail.conf line that
would accomplish what I'm trying to do?
Thanks,
Steve Prior