[Wylug-help] Fetchmail setup

[A J Cole]

>I've been wondering if I can simplify my email setup. I currently have
>fetchmail + postfix + procmail. The fetchmail documents don't sing the
>praises of procmail, plugging maildrop instead. However due to bug
>
>https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/courier-authlib/+bug/102947
>
>maildrop seems to be broken on ubuntu.
>
>So does anybody use a 2 stage setup?

I presume you are wondering if you could simplify your existing setup
by doing without either fetchmail or procmail whilst still using postfix
as your mail transfer agent (MTA)?

Well the answer is yes and no: in fact you could go to a one "stage"
setup (or a zero "stage" setup).

The zero "stage" setup would be to let your ISP(s) take care of all your
mail transfers, this is what the vast majority of users have traditionally
done. Recently, here I am vastly simplifying and ignoring pre-history!!!,
by using a POP/IMAP client to pick up e-mail from the ISP's server(s)
and SMTP to "send" mail through the ISP's systems.  More recently there
has been a massive switch to "web-mail" of various sorts.

I presume that you have reasons why this approach is not for you.
You perhaps want to use local mail between multiple users on the same box?
You want to run and manage your own setup?  There are just a couple of
possible reasons.

Assuming that you aren't receiving (external) e-mail (via SMTP) directly
to your MTA (postfix) then you need Fetchmail to retrieve your (and your
users?) e-amil from your ISP(s).  It is very flexible and mature software
and best of breed: in fact I don;t think it has any real competition
(others may correct me here).

On the (internal) delivery side.  Postfix is quite capable of delivering
to user mailboxes without using procmail as its mail delivery agent (MDA).
If fetchmail is mature then procmail is uber-mature. I have certainly
been using it (with sendmail as the MTA) for 20 if not 30 years with
large numbers of users and quite high volumes of traffic (well into the 5
figure range per day).  It started life (others may have longer memories)
as a scripting tool, executed from the users .mailrc as an individual
mail filter and then many adopted it as their sendmail MDA of choice
(so users didn't need to explicitly include it in their .mailrc).

Maildrop is an MDA - it doesn't at a quick look appear to offer any
advantage over procmail other than perhaps its use (more precisely its
non-use) of memory while processing mega mail messages.  A quck look
at that bug thread isn't too worrying since nearly all the reports are
of an error message being produced (with mail still being delivered)
which appears to be due to maildrop's development as the(?) MDA for the
Courier MTA.

To sum up, apart from your use of postfix (rather than sendmail!!!),
your mail architecture is fine: all the componets are most certainly
main-stream.  Any simplification would depend on your objectives.

If it's mature software, virtually zero maintainance and not broken why
change it?

Andrew