On Fri Dec 13 1996, I wrote:
On Thu Dec 12 1996, "Alan K. Stebbens" wrote:
When you fetch mail from your ISP with "popclient", procmail doesn't get
involved at all. It can't. Your ISP's mailer system is receiving the
mail, via SMTP, and probably with Sendmail, but even that isn't a sure
thing.
[...stuff about pop'ed email not locally delivering via SMTP...]
The solution is to use `fetchmail', which *can* be configured to
deliver pop'ed email locally via smtp (or even deliver it to another
host with smtp).
[Disclaimer: I've never used either program... I'm just going by what
I've seen in other mailing lists and usenet.]
[...lsm about fetchmail-2.2...]
I retract this disclaimer and can now say categorically that fetchmail
does indeed deliver email locally via smtp. It works just GREAT!
Until last weekend, I used to use ~/.forward files on my remoote ISP
accounts to get email sent to me when I log on via ppp (I have a
static IP address). The problem with this is that mail would be
queued on these remote machines, which would periodically test for my
presence on the net (and get "no response" when I was not logged on).
As long as I logged in regularly and waited until they "discovered"
that I'm online, I would get my mail, and no sendmail "warnings" about
undelivered messages would be sent to those who emailed me.
When I was discovered to be online (often waiting for up to an hour),
I would get *swamped* with tuckloads of incoming mail - which would
sometimes get procmail so busy it would totally bog down my 386 cpu
for periods of up to 30-40 minutes!
At one time (around a year ago) I tried using `popclient', but did not
use it as the message headers (the `From ' line in particular) would
get totally mangled with the name of my local host substituted from
what was in there originally! It did not deliver locally via smtp but
directly into a local file, my $MAIL file by default (unless I missed
something fundamental in the docs for it). Absolutely no good at all
for my purposes.
After the recent discussions about using POP/procmail, I finally
decided to test out `fetchmail' - and it is BRILLIANT!
It does indeed deliver via smtp via my sendmail daemon. The
`Received: ' header lines show a delivery path exactly as they do if
they are delivered to me via my remote ~/.forward files, and none of
the other header files are touched. Moreover, not only can fetchmail
be used `on demand', it can also be used in daemon mode to fetch mail
on a periodical basis.
I'm now using fetchmail, and I can highly recommend it for others that
are in my position.
FYI, find below here a snippet from the fetchmail man page.
Cheers .
Tony _--_|\
tony(_at_)trishul(_dot_)sci(_dot_)gu(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au / *\
T(_dot_)Nugent(_at_)sct(_dot_)gu(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au
ae(_dot_)nugent(_at_)student(_dot_)qut(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au\_(_dot_)--(_dot_)_/
tnugent(_at_)cit(_dot_)gu(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au
tony(_at_)sctnugen(_dot_)ppp(_dot_)gu(_dot_)edu(_dot_)au v Brisbane
Qld Australia
-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-=*#*=-
NAME
fetchmail - fetch mail from a POP or IMAP server
SYNOPSIS
fetchmail [ options ] [mailserver...]
DESCRIPTION
fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility; it
fetches mail from remote mailservers and forwards it to
your local (client) machine's delivery system. You can
then handle the retrieved mail using normal mail user
agents such as elm(1) or Mail(1). The fetchmail utility
can be run in a daemon mode to repeatedly poll one or more
systems at a specified interval.
The fetchmail program can gather mail from servers sup-
porting any of the common mail-retrieval protocols: POP2
(as specified in RFC 937), POP3 (RFC 1939), IMAP2bis (as
implemented by the 4.4BSD imapd program), and IMAP4 (as
specified by RFC 1730). It can use (but does not require)
the LAST facility removed from later POP3 versions.
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, or qmail). All the delivery-control
mechanisms (such as .forward files) normally available
through your system MDA will therefore work.
[...munch...]