On Thu, Jan 27, 2000 at 07:35:28PM -0800, Matthew Sanderson wrote:
> The problem is that I'm trying to do precisely what fetchmail's manpage
> says does not work well: fetch mail from a multi-drop mailbox using IMAP
As you may be aware, that's because the recipient info is sometimes only
in the message envelope, rather than in the headers, and this is usual
with mailing lists. Indeed, the headers are largely irrelevant, because
the MTA uses the envelope addresses for delivery.
Have a look at any message you get from a mailing list, you'll see
something like this:
> Received: from bclass.spectrum.com.au ([203.101.23.85])
> by swamprat.vastsystems.com.au (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id OAA22945
> for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Fri, 28 Jan 2000 14:46:57 +1100
This may be the only way to identify the recipient, but there can be more
than one recipient of a message and only one of tehm will be in the
headers.
Some MTAs (e.g. qmail) deliver a separate message to each recipient, so
the recipient will always be in the headers, but others (e.g. sendmail)
send one message to each domain with multiple recipients.
*If* your ISP will setup their MTA to put a header in each message
containing the list of actual recipients, then you can get fetchmail to
use that to identify recipients.
> What's the correct way to do this?
The best way is to setup your own MX host, and have your ISP act as
secondary when you're not connected. You need a static IP address, but
you don't need to be permanently connected. However, if a message has
been in your ISP's queue for a few hours, the MTA will send a warning to
the sender that the message hasn't yet been delivered, so you'd best
collect mail fairly regularly overnight (once per hour should be OK).
> What is ETRN and should I use it?
ETRN is used to tell a secondary MX to send any mail queued for your
domain, and is of absolutely no use to you with your current setup. Some
ISPs don't allow ETRN anyway (e.g. connect.com.au).
> Could someone mail me a working .fetchmailrc for this situation? It's not
> a very unusual one, I believe.
Setup fetchmail in single user mode, and use procmail and a perl program
to process each message. Ugly, needs regular care and maintenance (a rule
for each mailing list), and there'll probably be mail that still can't be
delivered and will need manual intervention. I do this at home, and it
works mostly because there's only two of us, and we don't change list
subscriptions often.
If you *really* want to do this, let me know and I'll send you what I use
at home.
Cheers,
John
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