[Techtalk] Fetchmail/Postfix/Hosts

[Sini Mäkelä]

Hi,

Having fetchmail/postfix mail setup myself and remembering how
relatively I thought it was to setup, I would be glad to help.

> Based on what I've found online, "connect to bluegirl failed" implies
> that it can't deliver the messages to my machine. (that's the message it
> gives me, I just noticed that it didn't spit it out to the text file I
> saved the output to)

It probably printed that out to the stderr stream, if you redirected
only stdout (used ">") then it doesn't save it into the text file.
You can redirect stderr to the same place as stdout by adding "2>&1" at
the end of the command line. For example:

  fetchmail > fetchmail.txt 2>&1

This works at least in bash. If somebody knows better ways, please
enlighten me.

> Have changed the name in /etc/hosts - multiple times, in fact, and if
> I'd been more aware of it, I'd swear that it's changing the name in
> hosts back to localhost.localdomain.... 
> 
> Here's my /etc/hosts
> 127.0.0.1               bluegirl.azurosedesign.com      localhost
> 
> Can't think what else might help you help me troubleshoot... I'd post my
> main.cf in here, too, but that's a lot of text, for something that might
> not be necessary.

Umm... why do you need to change the local interface name? Shouldn't you
change the inet interface (eth0, ppp0, whatever) name instead? I never
touched the localhost line myself.

About main.cf. You didn't tell us what kind of network configuration you
have. If you are trying to do what I am doing, sending internet mail to
the ISP smtp server and delivering local mail through local delivery (how
obvious :)). Following keywords are useful:

mydomain = <your_hostname> 
myorigin =  $mydomain
mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain $mydomain
relayhost = <smtp_server_name> 
virtualmaps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
 
And in virtualmaps you would have something like:

root root at localhost
user user at localhost

HTH,

- Sini