Help configuring email server...

[Brian Densmore]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: linux at bizniche.com
> 
> 
> I've made some big progress getting the email working. 
> 
> Brian, I was looking at the How-To that B. Densmore pointed me to at
> www.amason.net.  
Another happy customer! Glad it helped you!

> 
> So far, the following working:
> 1) Sending and receiving local and remote mail from mutt or
> squirrelmail.
> 2) Mail is getting to ~/Maildir so IMAP stuff works.  I can setup the
> IMAP connection via thunderbird, and pull mail from there.  
> 3) Fetchmail is pulling mail from a pop3 account, and dumping 
> it into my
> local account.  
> 
> Here is what's not working yet.
> 1)  Fetchmail only runs when I tell it to (either with commandline or
> the webmin interface).  I am supposing that cron could handle this for
> me, but want to make sure there is no built-in fetchmail periodic
> checking feature that I'm missing.
I don't use fetchmail, so YMMV.

<quote>
Simply invoking fetchmail -d 900

will, therefore, poll all the hosts described in your 
~/.fetchmailrc file except those explicitly excluded
with the 'skip' verb) once every fifteen minutes.
</quote>

If you run this then you shouldn't have to worry about 
fetchmail only running when you tell it to. Also, you 
can add this line to your rc.local file and every time 
the system boots fetchmail will run as a daemon. Provided 
of course you have an rc.local and it is called as part of 
your boot process. Sure it's ugly to put it in rc.local like 
this rather than as a full blown script procedure, but hey it
should work. The 900 is of course 900 seconds. No need for a
cron entry.


> 2)  I _really_ want to find out if there is way I can get 
> fetchmail (or
> something else?) to put mail it gets from the pop accounts into IMAP
> folder based on which account it pulls from.  
I'll have to research this one.

> 3)  I still need to get exim to send via my ISP's smtp server 
> for those
> domains that block dynamic hosts.  I was reading that you can 
> set it up
> to only use the smarthost for some hosts, and not all.  I'm 
> not sure if
> it would be better to selectively use the smarthost, or to use it for
> all mail.  
It should be possible but you'll need to go into the exim config files
for this. There are documents on how to do this. I haven't done it, but have
looked at the exim documentation. I wish you luck. Lots of it. ;')