sendmail

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

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 .


> 
>>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.


Kind Regards,
    Kostas