On Fri, Jul 13, 2001 at 06:00:13PM -0500, Phil Brutsche wrote: > > A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far way, someone said... > > > Howdy folks, > > > > I'm setting up a small (2-3 workstations, one server, all debian) > > network at home, and I'm trying to implement an idea that I had > > for the mail system. My apologies if it's too offtopic. > > If you want to figure out how to do it with Debian it's not off-topic :) > > > The scenario is: > > > I have several email addresses, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] and > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] At the moment, I use fetchmail to pull all > > my email from these three accounts onto my box. > Now I am confused too.
I have two different computers running exim. One is set up to use a smarthost to send mail and the other sends it directly. Both connect via a ppp connection - the one that sends directly is on ADSL though. Looking through both the exim.conf files: Computer using smarthost has the following in the ROUTERS CONFIGURATION section: ------------------------------------ smarthost: driver = domainlist transport = remote_smtp route_list = "* smtp.ozemail.com.au bydns_a" end ------------------------------------ The other which sends directly has the following in the same section: ------------------------------------ lookuphost: driver = lookuphost transport = remote_smtp literal: driver = ipliteral transport = remote_smtp end ------------------------------------ So I don't understand why you can't just send mail directly. From what I can see, when you send an email, exim attempts to connect to the mail server which the message is intended for. By using a smarthost, it just adds an extra step and then your ISP does the connection to the server the message is ultimately for. The main benefit of this I thought was so that when you send mail and there is difficulty establishing the connection to the "ultimate destination" mail server then the ISP will continue to try for you later. However, I think that exim by default will continue to send the message for 4 days before giving up. So long as you connect several times within these 4 days and flush exims que each time then there is a very good chance the mail will get sent. I have a script in the /etc/ppp/ip-up.d directory which flushes exims que each time I connect. I haven't experienced any problems with sending mail except on one occasion when my message was blocked because my ipaddress was black listed in the RBL of someones SMTP server - or something like that? I think this was because I am on a dynamic IP address and some other user may have previously attempted to abuse the server or send some spam? Anyway, please let me know if it is a bad idea to send mail directly rather than through a smarthost when you are on an intermittent PPP link. Thanks. mdevin.