qmail and other pop server

[john7002]

Hi,


I have configured a qmail server for my local network but I can't find how to fetch the emails for an other distant server. I mean several persons on my network have a login and a password on a pop server that I know the adress (mail.pop.xxx.xxx) and I would like that qmail can contact the server and transfert the emails on my local server. Does anybody know how to configure my qmail server in such a way? Thanks

PS: Of course after i'd like to distribute the emails on all the others computers of the network but it's an other story....

[adaptr]

You can't - qmail is an MTA.
Mail is only ever sent to an MTA - it does not collect any.

You want to look into fetchmail - this will do everything you ask for.
Oh and to distribute the mail onto your network you need a POP or IMAP server - I believe a POP server is included with qmail.
_________________
>>> emerge (3 of 7) mcse/70-293 to /
Essential tools: gentoolkit eix profuse screen

[jimcooncat.]

I've been using getmail for a couple weeks now on a small server with qmail. I ran into some trouble with it. This one doesn't run as a daemon like fetchmail can, but as an item you run from cron (fetchmail can do that too).

I had designated cron jobs for individual users to get their mail. Of course, several sessions began running concurrently, and my little IBM ran out of memory twice. By the time I got to the office in the morning, everything was backed up, and I had to manually run getmail while my users waited for a couple hundred messages to process.

I ended up running getmail from a single cron job, so it's only getting one email at a time. This is working well for me, though I did have to write a bash script so only one job would run at a time (if one getmail wasn't finished by the time it was to run again).

Anyway, when I was evaluating what I would run, I was scared off from running fetchmail by this quote from getmail's author, Charles Cazabon. " do not like some of the design choices which were made with fetchmail. getmail does things a little differently, and for my purposes, better. In addition, most people find getmail easier to configure and use than fetchmail. Perhaps most importantly, getmail goes to great lengths to ensure that mail is never lost, while fetchmail (in its default configuration) frequently loses mail, causes mail loops, bounces legitimate messages, and causes many other problems."

He goes on to cite a whole slew of security problems (http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/getmail-3.0/faq.html#faq).

The only other alternative I could see was to open my port 25 and direct the mail directly from the internet to the server, but I had some problems determining how to keep from having an open relay, and don't have much downtime to experiment in. We're busy late at night, early in the mornings, and on weekends. I wasn't sure how qmail would handle the concurrency/memory issues either, but I'm becoming confident in using djb's tools.

Anyone have some fetchmail stories? Are Cazabon's claims of lost emails legitimate?

— JimCooncat
Fly-by-Night Operations Empowerment Advocate