Leafnode and fetchmail (was Re: [Techtalk] Opera Help with Replies)

Conor Daly conor.daly at oceanfree.net
Sun Nov 2 21:58:29 EST 2003


On Sun, Nov 02, 2003 at 02:24:04PM -0500 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
TechChiq thought:
> On Sun, 2003-11-02 at 07:06, Conor Daly wrote:
> > You might consider serving your own email at home.  Use a combination of
> > fetchmail and sendmail to POP your email when connected and then point
> > evo at your local mail account.  As far as evo is concerned, it's just
> > another mail server.  This is not terribly clear is it?  It goes like
> > this:
> 
> > To read news, you just point pan (or whatever) at localhost rather than
> > your normal news server.  I used this for some time at home on dialup.
> 
> That won't solve my problem, but instead make MORE problems. :( I don't
> want to, care to, nor intend to run a server that is connected to the
> internet at all. I want a *client* not a server. 

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.  leafnode is not intended to run as an
_internet_ server.  Instead it runs as a server for the _local_ machine or
network.  To get the newsgroups, it runs 'fetchnews' an nntp _client_
which downloads the news articles as necessary.  As far as connections out
to the internet are concerned, there is no difference between this and
pan.  fetchnews simply downloads newsgroups.  leafnode provides the news
server interface than readers like pan expect except that it does so on
the local network and not out to the internet.

In the same fashion, fetchmail is a mail _client_ as far as the internet
is concerned.  Since you're on dialup, I assume your connection costs by
time online.  In that case, you need to be able to queue email for
delivery rather than sending at once.  Depending on your email client (I
don't know evo), you may be able to have the client queue your mail but
otherwise, you need a mail server running on your machine.  According to
your mails thus far, you're sending directly via your ISP's SMTP server.
This means either you are composing email while online or your mail client
is queueing for you.

> As mentioned, Pan
> doesn't do binary attachments in a very intuitive way (actually, the
> newest version says it does but I never can tell if a header has an
> attachment or not and opening one I know that does, won't show there is
> an attachment to download).

I'm not exactly clear on what you want here.  Assuming a news item has a
binary attachment.  When you see it in a list of headers, there's no
attachment info.  If you view it, you then see that there is a binary
attachment.  Now, you have to decide whether to download the attachment or
not.  With such a message, you have a few choices:

1.  Read the header and ignore the rest.
2.  Read the header and message but ignore the attachment.
3.  Read header and message and download the attachment.

Then you have to decide whether to do this with _all_ messages.  If your
choice is 3. above, leafnode (well, fetchnews) will do exactly that.  It
will download headers, messages and attachments from groups that you are
interested in.  In the case of binary newsgroups, this will result in
fairly big downloads and may not suit unless you want to see _every_
binary attachment in the group.  If not, you can set 

 delaybody = 1
	With this option set, fetchnews (8) fetches only the headers of an
	article for visual inspection.  Only when the headers have been
	read, the bodies of the articles will be retrieved the next time
	fetchnews (8) is called. This can save a huge amount of down­ load
	time and disk space.

and scan through the headers and tag for download those of interest.
However, it's likely that pan (and others) have a 'tag for download'
option already.  I know Outlook Express had such an option 4 years ago
when I used to use it.
 
> I just want a user-friendly, basic, HTML-compatible, newsreader *client*
> that will let me tell by the headers what messages have attachments,
> show attachments in the message (either as downloadable link, or inline
> image or an image at the end of the message) and be able to read them
> offline.

If you're happy to download all the messages (including attachments),
leafnode / fetchmail will do it for you.
 
> I don't at this point care to mess with servers. I plan to keep my ports
> either stealth or closed when I'm connected to the internet (as I do
> now).

This bit doesn't change with the use of fetchnews / leafnode since
fetchnews acts just like a client to the internet.
 
Conor (muddled)
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
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