On Sun, 17 Dec 2000, Phil Brutsche wrote: > fetchmail can be told to deliver mail by calling an external program (ie > /usr/sbin/exim with the appropriate command-line parameters) rather than > try to connect to an SMTP server.
It's even possible to remove exim from the picture completely in some cases. I have fetchmail, procmail, and ssmtp installed. I use the fetchmail config option 'mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T"' to have fetchmail deliver straight to procmail, which sorts the mail and dumps it into the appropriate mail folders. Then ssmtp is configured to send all mail using my ISP's SMTP server, so that anything that needs to use /usr/sbin/sendmail still works. Pros: * Noticeably faster than using a MTA to deliver large amounts of mail (like the linux-kernel mailing list), since it cuts down on the number of synchronous file writes * Nothing bound to port 25 Cons: * Can't be used to deliver local-local mail * No mail queueing * Nothing bound to port 25 :) * Less flexible than using an MTA Brad