Re: Alpine mail client. Fresh install of 6.8. "Mail" works but Alpine problems
Stefan, A million thanks! Local host works! Too simple -- too logical! I would never have imagined that Alpine wouldn't have worked without that. Going to my mounted backup drive Look at how long I haven't needed to change one of the shell configuration files! ...: - pwd /home/... cd oldq3/ ls -l .cshrc -rw--- 1 ... ... 2707 Sep 23 2002 .cshrc -- Of course I regularly change certain minor features in pine/Alpine's .pinerc so last change was earlier this month. I am sure I never changed the smpt-server configuration, however. [not showing the .pinerc file date here since it changes often] Extract from old .pinerc -- smtp-server was always left blank up till now... --- # List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Pine uses sendmail. smtp-server= # NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading. nntp-server= Now going into the newly installed Alpine mail client Setup/Configure menu -- SMTP Server (for sending) = NNTP Server (for news)= I NOTE THAT FIRST USE AFTER NEW INSTALL, if there is no .pinerc file yet, it immediately tries to send a message back to the maintainers at U. of Washington, and obviously expects that to work, but instead, it immediately hangs. That probably means that something in how OpenBSD is configured these days, doesn't allow for that. But maybe it should, or rather, a small change in the patches for the Alpine port configuration, for OpenBSD, could allow for it to immediately send from the box where Alpine was just newly installed. Looking directly into the new .pinerc file: Extract follows: # List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail. smtp-server= # NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading. nntp-server= /Extract i.e. same as ever Now after using the Setup/Configure menu in the latest version from 6.8 packages and setting the server to "localhost", as you suggested, the .pinerc looks like: Extract: # List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail. smtp-server=localhost # NNTP server for posting news. Also sets news-collections for news reading. nntp-server= /Extract AND THAT WORKS LIKE A CHARM! What's really curious is the statement in .pinerc that "If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail." Well to me that implies that it would use sendmail on the local host, so one wouldn't think that one would also have to specify it in the setup menu for first use. --- After one already had to deal with the initial "hang"! I note that the sendmail we now have is the pseudo Sendmail provided by the newer smpt/smptd system. I can't see that being the problem. Maybe some patch to Alpine was made for tighter OpenBSD security, or there is some additional system configuration I should have attended to these days. I'll put into my todo list to do a little more code digging, and look at the port if no one else gets to it. At the moment I have an incredible backlog of work and apologies to make for lost incoming emails after being down for a week, and also not replying even after incoming email was working and I had the awkward work-around of "Mail". I note that .calendar is not working for me. Wonder if it is a related kind of deeper problem in my system setup. Not critical though Most Alpine users (if any are still left), probably use an external mail server, and would have filled in something, so would never see this problem. Still would like to hear from any regular OpenBSD Alpine users. - Now to set up a new webserver too. And then maybe even do some crucial Year End company paperwork [Wish I had some time left for programming!] Stefan, again, thanks so much. Regards, Austin Hook Milk River, Canada On Sat, 23 Jan 2021, Stefan Hagen wrote: > Hi Austin, > > aus...@computershop.ca wrote: > > 2) Any reason why the new pseudo-Sendmail wouldn't handle Apline as > > well as the old one did? > > This mailing list is mostly for porting work and not for questions about > functionality or bugs that are not related to the porting process but > the software itself. > > That being said, I played around with alpine. You're right. If you leave > "smtp-server=" empty, sending an email gets stuck as you described. > > I've tried to set "smtp-server=" to localhost as well as to my > SMTP/SMTPs OpenSMTPd server. Those
Re: Alpine mail client. Fresh install of 6.8. "Mail" works but Alpine problems
Hi Austin, aus...@computershop.ca wrote: > 2) Any reason why the new pseudo-Sendmail wouldn't handle Apline as > well as the old one did? This mailing list is mostly for porting work and not for questions about functionality or bugs that are not related to the porting process but the software itself. That being said, I played around with alpine. You're right. If you leave "smtp-server=" empty, sending an email gets stuck as you described. I've tried to set "smtp-server=" to localhost as well as to my SMTP/SMTPs OpenSMTPd server. Those configurations are working fine and maybe you can use one of these? Why it gets stuck when falling back to the sendmail binary, I don't know. Using the sendmail binary manually is working here. The correct list to address this would be: https://opensmtpd.org/list.html Best Regards, Stefan
Alpine mail client. Fresh install of 6.8. "Mail" works but Alpine problems
Just set up a brand new ASUS desktop with 6.8, so as to replace my old mail
server,
which died after 15 years or so (but well backed up and have 20 odd years of
emails
saved on it). I have a few local users on it, and we are used to using good
old alpine.
The basic "Mail" client works fine, both sending and receiving, however, having
installed
the Alpine client, which seems to work fine for handling incoming mail, I was
surprised to find
that newly composed outgoing email, or replies to ones received cause Alpine to
hand endlessly,
I actually have to close the X-window to get out of it -- even so it is still
running so I
have to issue a kill -9 to stop it.
Feels to me that somehow there is a lock on some file that Alpine wants to use,
but I can't see
anything like mbox.lock or whatever. Whoops, above paragraph: s/hand/hang
Here's my /etc/main/smtp.conf
# This is the smtpd server system-wide configuration file.
# See smtpd.conf(5) for more information.
table aliases file:/etc/mail/aliases
listen on socket
# To accept external mail, replace with: listen on all
#
# listen on lo0
listen on all
action "local_mail" mbox alias
action "outbound" relay
# Uncomment the following to accept external mail for domain "example.org"
#
# match from any for domain "example.org" action "local_mail"
match from any for domain "computershop.ca" action "local_mail"
match from any for domain "hook.org" action "local_mail"
match from any for domain "mrdoctors.ca" action "local_mail"
match from local for local action "local_mail"
match from local for any action "outbound"
--
Here's text from the hanging outgoing test message:
To : aus...@hook.org
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject : Re: test message from gmail to cs...@computershop.ca
- Message Text -
replying to test message below from cshop
On Thu, 21 Jan 2021, Austin Hook wrote:
> test message from gmail to cs...@computershop.ca
>
[Sending mail |<= This line incomplete says something like 0%
---
Am behind our firewall so here's an extract of the rules:
emailports = "{ smtp, pop3, imap, imap3, imaps, pop3s }"
...
### Externally originated mail traffic redirected to our internal mailserver
match in on $ext_if proto tcp to $ext_if port $emailports rdr-to $emailserver
### Stop mail from Local net from IPs where no mail should come from
block in quick on $int_if proto tcp from { $hp $wlrouter $dynamic $accounting }
port $emailports
...
### Local net will need help accessing the mailserver ###
match in on $int_if inet proto tcp from $int_if:network to $ext_if \
port $emailports rdr-to $emailserver
match out on $int_if proto tcp from $int_if:network to $emailserver \
port $emailports nat-to $int_if
pass out on $ext_if from $localnet to any nat-to $ext_if
--
Getting pretty rusty here... set it up 10 years ago and it's taken me a week
of being down ,so far,
to deal with dozens of gotchas, like forgetting our last nameserver was down as
well, and the ns2 location
went away a year ago, and I should have covered that problem at the time.
Still have to set up our
web pages again. etc. etc.
I wonder if alpine used new mail ports I never heard of back then and probably
gave too much info here,
Except what really is needed. Here's a few basic questions perhaps some can
answer top of their head:
1) Anyone still running Alpine in this era of 6.8?
2) Any reason why the new pseudo-Sendmail wouldn't handle Apline as well as
the old one did?
In general, kudos, to the OpenBSD folks who bring so much basic functionality
into OpenBSD itself. I'll
be delighted if I can just use this simplified framework successfully.
3) Any further comments?
Austin
