[K12OSN] E-mail puzzle

[Paul Davison]

Bert Rolston wrote:

>Hi folks,
>
><snip>
>
>Fetchmail can collect domain mail from the ISP as the "mailman" user.
>"mailman" is also a user on the local server.
>
>HOW do I get individual mail from the mailman account using Squirrel
>mail EG. user1 mail into user1 Squirrel mail mailbox from the "mailman"
>account, user2,3...x and so on?
>  
>
<snip>

Hi Bert,

I assume that the way you have your domain mail being delivered is as 
follows.  the email for all users in you domain is collected in a single 
mailbox on your ISP's server. Then you are using Fetchmail to collect 
all the mail from that account. and what you wish to do is have your 
server sort the mail back out to the individual users it was originally 
meant for.  Is that a correct assumption?

If the above assumption is correct, Fetchmail will probably do what you 
need.
You are probably already running fetchmail as root in daemon mode.  In 
the .fetchmailrc you probably  have an entry like the following:

poll mail.yourisp.com proto pop3 user "mailman" password "secretpassword"


if you change that to something like:

poll  mail.yourisp.com  proto pop3 localdomains  your.domain.com :
   user "mailman" with pass "secretpassword"  to * here

This tells fetchmail to collect the mail and deliver it to the sendmail 
daemon on your machine for local delivery. This assumes that the email 
addresses and usernames are the same.  I am pretty sure you need to be 
running the daemon as root for this to work properly.

You might want to take a look at the fetchmail man page or fetchmail 
howtos from Eric Raymonds homepage http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/  
He has examples/trouble shooting  and some do's and don't for multidrop 
mailboxes.

I might add that if you have a persistent, or semi persistent connection 
to the internet, you would probably have much better results having an 
MX record added to your domain's DNS server to have the mail 
automatically delivered straight to your mailserver instead of a dropbox.

Hope that helps

Paul Davison