On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Aidan Gauland wrote:
My sticking point is... setting it up. In mail readers I have used up until
now, there are separate fields in the configuration dialogs for each
parameter for the mail servers. In Alpine, it's all one field for both the
"inbox" and the SMTP server, and I don't know how it's supposed to be
formatted. Last time I tried to use Alpine, I copied something from the web,
but it had no explanation, so I don't know what exactly I was telling Alpine
(and my mail server). I think part of it said to accept invalid SSL
certificates, which I definitely don't want.
Hokay... there are several things that get into the act of futzy
around with mail.
Question 1 is are you going to try act as a smarthost for yourself and
a bunch of other boxes?
At one time the answer was, duh, yes, I'm running Linux the truly
smart Ruler of the mail universe, so of course....
But then spamalanche buried us.... so now there seems to be a de facto
unmentioned rule that only mail relayed via your ISP's smarthost will
reliably be transmitted to the destination.
I haven't quite worked out what drops it, whether it's whitelists or
port filters or what. I've given up, I always configure it to use my
upstream / ISP's smarthost.
There are two places to configure that, one is when you install
sendmail or exim or whatever your distro installs by default, and the
other in the Alpine config..
Personal Name = John Carter
User Domain = example.co.nz
SMTP Server (for sending) = mailhost.example.co.nz
NNTP Server (for news) = newshost.example.co.nz
Inbox Path = /home/johnc/mail/inbox
Note that I have configured an inbox. (The default is
/var/spool/mail/johnc or something)
So alpine is assuming something somehow is coughing up your mail into
that file. Who or what is _not_ it's department.
In the Good Old Days, you'd have your own static ip address and ip
name and MX records in the DNS and mail would wend it's way directly
to sendmail running on your box which would spit it into your inbox.
Caution: Much Strong Language Blee$#$#ped out!!
Then the greedy ^%^%#! dirty @%#%! filthy @^%^# money @%$## grubbing
@^%$%$#! swine that are the global ISP's decided they can create an
artificial scarcity of IP names and addresses and charge a @$^%$#!
fortune for them.
So because the ^%#^! bean counters have ^%##!! broken the
internet... instead of it been delivered on arrival, you have to
"fetch"/poll for your mail from a POP3 or IMAP server. (Hmmph! And
they claim they have to "charge" for an ipname because of the traffic
load on their DNS... @$##!!!!)
I use the "fetchmail" package to do that, because it feeds very nicely
into the "procmail" package to sort my mail through spamprobe to
filter out the crud, and then into folders...
Everything that isn't sorted into anywhen else lands in my inbox.
This allows me to subscribe to a bunch of interesting discussion
groups (such as this).
==.fetchmailrc========================================================
set daemon 600
set logfile /home/johnc/log/fetchmail.log
poll mailhost.tait.co.nz with proto imap:
user "UUUUUUU" there has password "XXXXX"
is johnc here
mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T"
======================================================================
==.procmailrc=========================================================
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
LOGFILE=$HOME/log/procmail #recommended
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/inbox
:0 c
before-spamprobe
:0
SCORE=| /usr/bin/spamprobe train
:0 wf
| formail -I "X-SpamProbe: $SCORE"
:0 a:
*^X-SpamProbe: SPAM
SpamIAm
:0:
* ^TO_(linux-users@(it\.)?canterbury\.ac\.nz|canty...@yahoogroups\.com)
IN-cantlug
:0:
* ^TO_(gcc-help|help-gcc)@((gcc\.)?gnu\.org|prep\.ai\.mit\.edu)
IN-gcc-help
:0:
* ^TO_extremeprogramming@(yahoo|e)groups\.com
IN-xp
:0:
* ^to_ruby-t...@ruby-lang\.org
IN-ruby
:0:
* ^TO_concatenative@(yahoo|e)groups\.com
IN-stack
======================================================================
(Plus lots of other filters)
John Carter Phone : (64)(3) 358 6639
Tait Electronics Fax : (64)(3) 359 4632
PO Box 1645 Christchurch Email : john.car...@tait.co.nz
New Zealand
