sendmail

[Rick Stevens]

Kostas Sfakiotakis wrote:
> Greetings ,
> 
> Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> 
>> Any chance you could beat your mail program into submission and make
>> it wrap lines every 72 chars or so?  It would make this a lot easier
>> to read.  I'll reformat it.
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 06, 2005 at 11:09:53AM -0000, ajay wrote:
>>
>>>  
>>> hi folks
>>> i would be highly thankful if anyone can tell me how sendmail
>>> fetches mails from my .com server on internet
>>
>>
>>
>> sendmail doesn't fetch mail.  sendmail handles mail sent to it.
>>
>>
>>> i have redhat 9.0 and sendmail was working ok , since yesterday we
>>> are not receiving any mails from outside. i checked my .com server
>>> it's ok .  there 's something wrong in my config files.
>>
>>
>>
>> The most likely tool picking up your mail from another server would be
>> fetchmail.
>>
>>> specifically i want to know which configuration files, service is
>>> responsible to fetch mails from .com server.
>>> is it fetchmail/procmail.
>>
>>
>>
>> Probably.
>>
> 
> Well the story goes , somehow like this . Fetchmail is the tool that
> fetches email from the remote pop server . Fetchmail alters the
> recipient address so that sendmail is convinced that it is for the
> localhost and therefore should be localy delivered and then passes
> the email to sendmail . Now sendmail observes that the email should
> be localy delivered and passes it  to procmail or whatever programm
> /etc/mail/sendmail.cf  says is the Local Delivery Agent  ( if  i recall
> well , towards the bottom of sendmail.cf is a declaration saying
> MAILER(local)  ) .
> 
> So in the proccess of delivering email  fetchmail then sendmail and
> then procmail play their respective role .

Well, really fetchmail picks up the mail at the ISP, buggers the
recipient address, then passes it to the MTA listening on port 25
of localhost.  Most often, that's sendmail, but it could be qmail
or postfix or any one of a number of other MTA programs.

The MTA is then responsible for delivery (via procmail or some other
MDA).

>>> i really do not know , i tried a lot rolling my self in /etc/mail
>>> folder ,
> 
> 
> Well don't touch those files because other things can be messed
> up there. The files in /etc/mail are the ones that help sendmail act
> as an Mail Transfer Agent . You would better go to the home directory
> of the user in question and search for a file called ".fetchmailrc"
> ( notice the preceding dot "." it is an otherwise hidden file ) .
> This is the configuration file for fetchmail and a good starting point.

Also "man procmailrc" and "man procmailex" are good resources.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-  BASIC is the Computer Science version of `Scientific Creationism' -
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