At 08:45 2000-08-11 -0700, Larry Wright wrote:
My ISP is ending shell accounts, and I am wondering if one can use
procmail on a PC with mail retrieved with POP3, and if so, how it would
work.
Get and install some flavour of Linux. It runs on PCs. Now, if when you
say "PC", you're referring to the operating system "Windows", then the
answer is NO.
You could always consider taking some older hardware (or heck, brand new
stuff -- it isn't so expensive anymore), and building a gateway machine for
a home LAN to fetch and process your mail, as well as provide other
services (all of which are outside the scope of this mailing list). It
doesn't need to be a very powerful box (though once you install it and
start to use it, you'll regret tossing it on ancient hardware because
you'll be wanting to do so many things with it eventually).
If you set it up with a dedicated net connection (or at least static IP
address), and have a registered domain (or appropriatley listed host on
another domain), your server would be set up pretty much just like any
other mail server, although if you're not on a fulltime connection, you'll
need some scripts that tickle the MX server that accepts your mail while
you're offline to get it to queue the messages for transfer to your server.
OTOH, if you go the route of just using an existing POP or IMAP mailbox at
your ISP and using regular dialup access, 'fetchmail' is probably the
utility you want to use. I don't use it for the same thing as you (I have
actual servers running), but for a long time I've used it to fetch mail
from various remote accounts (including several at Netcom), so as to pull
all those messages under the fold of my monolithic procmailrc processing.
Once you get the mail to your mailspool on the linux box, procmail works
just as if you were running it on your ISP servers (with possible
exceptions, such as parsing the FROM header, which ends up being the
mailbox you're fetching the message from, rather than the original sender,
though I think there may be a fetchmail switch for fudging that).
Check the list archives for 'fetchmail' for some more information on it.
---
Please DO NOT carbon me on list replies. I'll get my copy from the list.
Sean B. Straw / Professional Software Engineering
Post Box 2395 / San Rafael, CA 94912-2395
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