On Thu, Jun 08, 2006 at 07:41:11PM -0400, rblythe wrote:
> Sorry fo being so vague. This is really only an experiment to increase
> my understanding. I will try to make some sense this time:
>
I gathered this was to be a learning experience, but for email the
devil is in the detail.
>
> This was basically a thought to do something different then what I am
> used to, and try to learn something along the way.
>
> Host System Setup (Mepis) - I use Thunderbird to get my e-mail from
> Comcast without a problem. It is stored on a separate partition that I
> can also access from Suse 10.0 and Windows Xp (my machine is a
> multi-boot set-up).
> I think my desire may be true overkill for my situation where
> Blytheworks is concerned. What I would like to try is this (please
> provide alternate solutions if I am over-doing it):
>
> I am really interested in the various servers and security applications
> right now. For the mail, I wanted to install Postfix and configure it
> so that it would get the e-mail from the Comcast server and download it
That isn't how it works! Postfix is an MTA : MTA's talk to each
other on port 25, but only as part of the onward _transmission_
('pushing') of mail (you are talking about _receiving_ or 'pulling').
I'm guessing that your mail at Comcast is on a POP3 server, but it
might be different (e.g. imap).
For that you probably want fetchmail (so, you run that either as a
daemon, or on demand (e.g. if not normally connected to the web) and
it pulls the mail down, and uses something like procmail to decide
which mailbox to put it into.
> to a separate folder on my vfat partition. I woud then configure
> Thunderbird to get the e-mail from the Postfix downloaded area so that I
> could read, reply and compose new e-mails. My hope is that while using
> Thunderbird, my e-mail would then be stored on the original Thunderbird
> vfat partition so that if by chance I am booted into one of the other
> systems, I can still read, reply, and compose e-mail messages without
> messing something up.
That should be fine, except that I have no idea where thunderbird
would store postponed messages which you had started to write but
had not sent (I used to use pine, which puts them in a mailbox, but
mutt seems to use /tmp which is system-specific and volatile across
reboots).
>
> My other reason for wanting Postfix (or any MTA) is that right now, if I
> want to compose and e-mail, I have to boot back into a system with and
> e-mail program on it instead of staying in my build environment. I
> noticed that one of the optional packages where Lynx (my web browser of
> choice until I build Firefox) is an MTA. My thinking is that with an
> MTA, if I run into a compile problem or get confused about something
> while learning more about BLFS, I could just compose and e-mail to
> blfs-support and go on to something else until I receive a reply. My
> hope also is that if this can be done, then I could download the e-mail
> responses as outlined above and keep the integrity of my existing
> Thunderbird e-mail box on a separate partition.
>
Ouch! I'd hate to be without a graphical browser now. I've no
idea what functionality an MTA brings to lynx, guess I'll have to
leave that question for the blfs editors.
What really matters is how you are going to send mail - if it all
goes through comcast's servers then yes, you can use postfix, but it
probably isn't going to add a lot of value [ although if your box is
mostly powered up, you could be mailing the output of cron jobs to
yourself, if that is useful to you ].
And if it doesn't go through ccomcast's servers, you've got other
problems. Actually, I'm reasonably certain that it does go through
comcast, beecause thunderbird isn't likely to have its own general
MTA built in. The problems would arise because your mail server
would not be routable from recipients, so some would drop you, and
others would drop you because your residential IP is in a blacklist.
Been there, done that, eventually gave it up because I couldn't post
on certain lists.
> Ultimately, because this is a single user machine, I may not really need
> any kind of server. I am only looking at this as a possible solution,
> but again even though I have used Linux for close to two years, I am as
> green as they come with this type of things (having a do-it-all distro
> is not as beneficial as one might think, especially with a tinkerer like
> me).
>
> Plus in my research about Postfix, I have seen some interesting things
> (spamassassin, virus protection) that I would like to learn how to use
> as well.
My incoming mail gets passed to spamassassin from my .procmailrc,
it doesn't depend on having an MTA. I don't have a requirement for
virus checking, but I'm sure the principle is the same.
One thing you need to do when reading about postfix is to
distinguish between documentation for "proper" mailservers who
expect to have other MTAs connecting to them (and may need to
establish rules to see if they will accept a connection, or to test
the received mail) and home users who do not get any incoming mail
from other MTAs.
>
> If you have any other possible solutions please let me know. I am not
> in a hurry. I am taking my time with this one.
>
I certainly would not want to try to disuade you from running
postfix, but I suspect that you would do better to start with
fetchmail-procmail-spamassassin-someviruschecker. Even with this,
you need to be careful - procmail is a strange beast (/me wishes it
was maintained) and somewhat idiosyncratic in its regexes : dropping
things into /dev/null is not a good idea unless you are absolutely
sure that you don't want whatever passes a particular test!
The real fun starts if you switch over to postfix for outgoing mail
- if anything is wrong, it may take some time for the bounces to
come back and you may not be able to post support questions until
you fix it. Before you do that, you should probably be comfortable
with lookign at mail headers to see where mail claims to have been.
Ken
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