On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Edwin Humphries wrote: > I'm configuring getmail on the server to check our various external > mailboxes and consolidate them locally into mail accounts on the > server. I run sendmail as a local SMTP server and to prevent local > emails from going out to the net for delivery, and was anticipating > that getmail would post mail to the sendmail mailboxes. > > However, the getmail documentation (such as it is) says it does not > need to use an MTA, but suggests that if you want to, use qmail. It > supports three types of mailboxes: mbox files, qmail Maildirs or piped > to a command (but not as root). > > The questions are: > > 1. If I don't use an MTA, how would I configure the WinNT email > clients (Pegasus 4)?
For picking up mail no problem, for sending you could specify your ISP's smtp service but I'm not recommending that. > 2. Can I use sendmail as the MTA? If so, how do I configure the > getmail output? In this scenario getmail writes to the mailboxes and sendmail doesen't (unless sending locally). Getmail will just go directly to the mailbox and sendmail can too. I don't know exactly what happens if they both try to write to the same mailbox at the same time but it should be possible with locking. > 3. What's an mbox? You're typical unix style mailbox as found in /var/spool/mail/<user> with default sendmail setups. Messages are simply appended to the end of the file with a blank line in between. They *must* start with "From " at the beginning of the first line. > 4. The piped to command seems a bit risky, according to the > documentation: is it a good option to send the mail to > sendmail? How would this work - would sendmail know which mailbox it should go >to? I'd only be using this for special tasks. Piping to commands is not a huge problem, just that when you're starting out I'd have the mail also go to a regular mailbox as well because you're bound to goof up and lose a few emails. EG in /etc/aliases gripz: grant,"|/etc/smrsh/chef.sh" This would send all incoming mail to gripz to both the grant mbox and the swedish chef translator shell wrapper. The shell wrapper might contain #!/bin/bash cat >/tmp/mail.$$ cat /tmp/mail.$$ >>/home/grant/mail/grant.orig cat /tmp/mail.$$ | chef >>/home/grant/mail/grant.translated rm /tmp/mail.$$ -- ---<GRiP>--- Web: www.arcadia.au.com/gripz Phone/fax: 02 4950 1194 Mobile: 0408 686 201 -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
