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Date:      Wed, 17 May 2000 05:59:28 -0600
From:      "Duke Normandin" <dnormandin@freewwweb.com>
To:        "Erik Trulsson" <ertr1013@student.csd.uu.se>
Cc:        "'freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org'" <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: Help! ppp/fetchmail/sendmail
Message-ID:  <004e01bfbff7$5c1a0660$b1dba7d1@dnormandinfreewwweb.com>

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On Tuesday, May 16, 2000 1:04 PM Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.csd.uu.se>
wrote:


>On Mon, May 15, 2000 at 09:15:45PM -0600, Duke Normandin wrote:
>> help......! I've got one hell of a hair-ball mess!
>>
>
>I guess that one of two things happened:
>1) sendmail wasn't configured to accept mail for your machine so it bounced
>   it back to your ISP.
>2) sendmail was configured to send all mail via your ISP so it did that.
>

Yep..... figured as much! Now I've got to fix it.....

>> On top of that, I had run fetchmail -v --keep, so when I fetched my
>> mail with Outlook Express, I had triplicates of everything.
>>
>> Well the upside is that ppp is working -- sort of. It tries to connect even
>> before I've logged on (in?). Could this be due to the start_if.tun0 script
>> that I'm using as per a suggestion in one of the ppp documents that
>> I've recently read?
>
>It is probably sendmail that is the cause of this. IIRC sendmail tries to
>do DNS lookups at regular intervals (including when it is started) and
>if the DNS server you use is at your ISP (which is often the case)
>it will cause ppp to try to connect.


OK.... I'll try to find documentation on sendmail's DNS lookups.

>> How do I get fetchmail to drop the 2 POP3 accounts to user:dnormandin


>Just run fetchmail as that user. It works for me at least.


I just discovered (learning all about "the Unix way") that I need to install
a MDA -- procmail was suggested in the tutorial I was reading today. Is this
what you use as well? If I understand this correctly, fetchmail only
"fetches" --
an MDA has to "fill the mailboxes" -- sendmail only delivers to my maildrops,
i.e. ISPs. Am I close?

>> on my system? Anybody have ideas on how I hosed sendmail.cf - or
>> what I didn't do. BTW, at the end of the sendmail manpages, they
>> suggest reading, "SENDMAIL Configuration and Settup" or something
>> like that. No joy -- can't find the bloody thing. Any ideas where it is?
>> As well, my `hostname` is odie.rockingd.calgary.ab.ca. Is this screwing
>> things up with regards to fetchmail/sendmail?
>If that hostname is correct (meaning the domain actually exists etc) there
>shouldn't be any problems.
>
>I know what I did to get a very similar setup to work.
>I looked at the sendmail configuration stuff, said "Uh?", realised I didn't
>really want to learn all the details of sendmail, so I ignored sendmail
>and installed qmail instead. It is a bit easier to configure.
>
>I am fairly certain that most (all?) of your problems are connected with
>sendmail, or rather your configuration of it.
>Not knowing much about sendmail I am afraid I can't help you to get it
>working but my advice would be to look at using some other MTA instead of
>sendmail since they are probably easier to configure. (Eg. qmail or postfix)
>
>I think that sendmail is primarily meant to be used on machines that are
>connected all the time and with a working DNS setup.
>It can probably be made to work in your case too, but don't ask *me* how :-)


Thanks for the `qmail` recommendation! It's very tempting, but I'm
inclined to learn sendmail, so that I can dive deeper in learning
"the Unix way". It's got to be do-able! *After* I get
sendmail/fetchmail/procmail all working properly, then I'll smile and kick
sendmail in the ass, and replace it with qmail ;^) If I go the easy route
now I'll never learn a thing -- or maybe I'm just a sucker for punishment?

thanks.......duke




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