[Techtalk] Mailserver against Yahoo

[Mary]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2002 at 02:20:55PM -0800, Hans Tegnerud wrote:
> Before I delve deeper into sendmail and the other mail servers... are
> there any advice or warnings you can give me? (I've heard about the
> dreadful sendmail config files and I recall something Eric S Raymond
> wrote... fetchmail? that's supposed to be a replacement for sendmail).

Fetchmail is a POP3/IMAP program that retrieves mail from a remote
mailbox and places it in the local queue by either handing it to
sendmail/exim/qmail/postfix/other Mail transport Agent or to another
program, eg procmail. It does not replace sendmail or other MTAs,
because it only fetches mail and adds it to the local queue, rather than
delivering local mail to locate or remote hosts.

You probably should set up a cron job that runs fetchmail half hourly,
waits for the fetchmail process to complete, and then runs your MTA's
mail queue (sendmail -q will do this if you are using sendmail). Both
fetchmail and sendmail have a way of doing this without using cron, but
cron will guarentee that they are in sync.

Fetchmail's man page is excellent. I've never configured sendmail, but
exim and other MTAs (postfix, qmail are two) will also do what you're
after. See if you can make sense of their online documentation. If you
can, choose that one. Even nullmailer should be adequate if all you want
to do is deliver all your mail to Yahoo. Why can't you use your ISP's
SMTP relay, anyway?

-Mary.

-- 
Mary
<mary at puzzling.org>