john gennard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >
> A couple of years ago, after reaching 70, I got a computer and following
> a frustrating few months with Windoze switched to Linux which lets me
> control things when, of course, I understand what I'm doing. Now, for
> good or ill, I'm 'hooked' and want to learn 'all about it' (a forlorn hope as
> each time I understand some aspect, another vast vista of knowledge
> yet to be acquired appears before me). In short, its become a hobby.
Okay, I completely understand. By the way, it's a pleasure to run into
someone who's not afraid of technology and not under 30 :). I'll see if I
can't make a few recommendations.
> Sendmail seems offered on most distros,
It seems to be mostly inertia, tradition, and the path of least resistance
that causes this.
> Nowhere have I seen any advice that the inexperienced should avoid [running
> a full MTA]
Well, that wasn't my biggest concern -- it's the fact that running a full MTA
on a dialup connection has its share of problems. For one thing, SMTP is
really designed as a 'push' protocol, and if your machine isn't connected
24/7, it can be kind of pointless. ETRN has been shoved in to try to work
around this, but it's not an elegant solution. Machines with sporadic net
connections really should get their mail through a 'pull' protocol, like POP3
or IMAP.
> Spam is starting to annoy me and so I decided to look at fetchmail,
> procmail, mutt and qmail as a 'package' which might enable me to do
> something about it.
Well, it would work. However, I think there are better combinations of
software. For sending mail, I would recommend you use Bruce Guenter's
nullmailer; it's a "dumb" relay-only MTA. Bruce has written a lot of the
commonly-used addons for qmail, and nullmailer's design is influenced heavily
by qmail's, although of course its simpler. You just plug the address of your
ISP's smarthost into a control file, set a couple of other things, and it
works. Then mutt can use nullmailer's /usr/sbin/sendmail wrapper to send
mail.
To retrieve mail, I don't recommend fetchmail -- it's too problematic,
although many of its worst design bugs are eliminated by not doing delivery by
SMTP re-injection. I would suggest you try my own replacement, getmail,
instead. As for procmail, I don't use it either, but one of getmail's users
wrote "procbox" to do basic procmail-like processing after retrieval with
getmail.
Check out http://untroubled.org/ for Bruce's software.
Charles
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Charles Cazabon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
GPL'ed software available at: http://www.qcc.sk.ca/~charlesc/software/
Any opinions expressed are just that -- my opinions.
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