Hi I have some questions regarding reading and sending mail through an ISP.
Prerequisites: isp uses login and password autentication
1. How do i read mail from my isp ? should i use fetchmail for this without involving sendmail ? 2. how do i send mail with sendmail through my ISP ? I searched on the internet and i couldn't find how to set the username and password for sendmail to autenticate to the smart relay (I understood that i have to set my ISP as a smart relay host in sendmail.cf file )
Any poiters to relevant documentation will be apreciated. (I have documentation for sendmail at home but i'm not sure i really have time to read all of it :-)
Good answers to your questions have more to do with the details of how your ISP is providing service than with Linux as such.
First, receiving mail:
If your connection is not on 24/7 (as most dialup-ppp connections are not), you will probably receive your e-mail with an address like [EMAIL PROTECTED] . It will be received by your ISP's mail server and held there for you, for downloading using POP3 (or, possibly, IMAP). In this case, you will need to use a POP3 client to get the mail; fetchmail is the standard client for Linux (though many browsers will act as POP3/IMAP clients too, if you prefer that approach).
If I am right in assuming that your ISP gives you access to your e-mail via POP3 or IMAP, then sendmail is irrelevant to your receiving mail.
Second, sending mail:
If your ISP requires userid/password authentication to send e-mail, it probably uses "pop before smtp". This means that when it gets an smtp connection from you (to send mail), before it accepts the mail it requires you to make a POP3 connection, which provides the password mechanism. (Please note that this is a guess, though -- it is the common way I know to do it, but I have no way to know for certain what *your* ISP actually does.)
In practice, on the client side, you comply with this requirement by checking mail before sending a message. Possibly if you set fetchmail to check mail frequently (every 10 minutes, perhaps, plus whenever a ppp connection is initiated), that will be enough to satisfy your ISP ... as I said, all this depends on what your ISP has decided to require, something no one her can tell you.
For some general background on POP before SMTP, take a look here to see what one ISP requires:
http://www.greencis.net/support/popb4smtp.shtml
Unless your ISP blocks outgoing destination-port-25 connections (some do, some don't), you could try using sendmail to send your e-mail directly to its destination, bypassing the ISP's relay. That is a stock sendmail (or exim or postfix or whatever) configuration, requiring nothing special from you ... though you will run into some anti-SPAM rejections if your IP address is on the "dialup list" (DUL) of some of the RBH sites.
- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs
