[Wylug-help] Fetchmail setup

[Simon Brown]

At Thu, 25 Nov 2010 11:02:14 GMT,
A J Cole wrote:
> >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)?

Quite the opposite in fact, postfix was what I have been trying to
eliminate.

I've just changed computer and reinstalled which has prompted the
re-evaluation. So I used to use mutt and had postfix configured to
relay outgoing mail to my ISP's smarthost. 

As I don't use mutt anymore and send the mail directly to my ISPs
servers I chose a simpler postfix setup this time round. I discovered
yesterday that mail was sometimes not being passed from postfix to
procmail and ending up in /var/spool/$USER I imagine I was shutting
the system down at the time. That never happened with my old setup.

So to avoid this annoyance and as I don't really use postfix anymore I
decided to look at eliminating it. I'm now using procmail as the
fetchmail mda and so far it seems to be working. 

> 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 don't like webmail and have no time for mail clients that can't
tidly work with mbox or Maildir mail stores

> 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).

I can't use smtp collection

> 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.

Maildrop on Ubuntu seems broken in the abscence of a full courier
setup, so I've ditched that idea.

> 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.

I used to use sendmail, exim as well. Infact I tend to use the
distro's default MTA, does that make me uncaring ;-)

Thanks for you response,

Simon