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1999-12-14 17:19:30

Hello there.

I originally sent this mail (possibly in error) to Philip Guenther.
A while later, I received some documentation from a mailing service.
It looks as if Philip passed on my query to them and that is how I came by
the documentation that was sent to me. 'Cause I sure didn't ask for it.
(Thank you, Philip) Unfortunately. It was not really much help to me
because I am still unsure as to what I should be using to do what job.
I read and write my mail with Pine. I have procmail, sendmail, Fetchmail 
and all of the other stuff from the RedHat Linux 6.0 distribution (One off
a comic - Not the full distribution from RH themselves)

It is all a little above my head at the moment because I am having trouble
in pinning down exactly what all the different terminology refers to.

I am reasonably new to Linux / Unix (nearly one year) and during the last
month or so I have endeavoured to set up e-mail properly.

Although I used to use FidoNet and used FrontDoor to handle my mail and
BBS, I am still finding all this unix & Internet e-mail rather daunting.

Procmail, Sendmail, Fetchmail, SMTP, ESMTP.... Aaaaarrrhggh!

I don't seem to be able to get my head round all of the various pieces of
documentation because each one on its own assumes that I have a working
knowledge of the rest of the system and therefore understand all of
the technical terms. If that was the case and I just needed the little
piece of detailed information to help me configure a different mail
agent, I would not be having a problem. Unfortunately, there is so
much to absorb and I find myself a little lost as to exactly what I
should be using for what and how...
I'll highlight the details of my setup in the hope that you will be able
to offer some guidance or point me in the direction of someone who can.
Please don't point me at a website... Or a newsgroup... Unfortunately, at
the moment, both of these facilities are not available to me for various
reasons, technical and financial..

I have a Red Hat 6.0 based intranet consisting of my main server and my
workstation (besides others, but these are the important ones for the
moment.)

I connect to my ISP from the server and use IP Masquerading to allow the rest
of my LAN to access the Internet. It is the server that collects and sends
my mail.

My ISP holds mail for my domain (moginet.org.uk) and I collect it via a
POP (3?) connection.
I use SMTP to send my mail back (I think) which I initiate manually with
sendmail -q

When my mail arrives in my machine it all sits in my mailbox even though
some of it may be for my wife or another member of Moginet.

If I send mail (still on the server) to my wife's account on the server,
it does not arrive until I do an external mail run.
Is it going out to my ISP then being picked back up ?
If I do sendmail -q without being online, the mail is NOT sent to my wife.

The situation that I would like to attain is as follows..

Any mail I send from any account to any other account (locally) will be
delivered immediately. Any mail that is to be queued for external delivery
will wait until connection is made.
Any incoming mail that is not for me is to be posted on to the appropriate
account locally.
I don't mind having to read and write all the mail from the server as my
workstation makes a telnet connection to the server anyway.
If I could also post mail around the various machines on the network, that
would be an advantage, but it is not strictly essential.

I had a couple of attempts at setting this up using the documentation for
sendmail, procmail and fetchmail, but I think that I smegged it up.!
When I rebooted the server it hung during the sendmail initialisation.
When I used Linuxconf to alter my setttings it overwrote the changes that
I made manually and allowed my machine to restart normally.
Bearing in mind that Linuxconf works this way, you may need to advise me
on how to set this up correctly using linuxconf rather than the ...cf and
...conf files.

Thanks for your attention in this matter and I hope to hear from you soon.

Paul..
The RoadRunner
paul(_at_)moginet(_dot_)org(_dot_)uk


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