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Re: More mail questions


From: Tim X
Subject: Re: More mail questions
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2006 16:38:28 +1000
User-agent: Gnus/5.11 (Gnus v5.11) Emacs/22.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Hadron Quark <hadronquark@gmail.com> writes:

> I am using smtpmail package through a gmail smtp server to send email.
>
> But if I use gnus to send a mail to "root@localhost" why isnt procmail
> picking it up and diverting it to my local root mmaildir? Procmail does
> its job just fine when I use the Linux commandline "mail" command.
>
> I'm unsure where postfix and smptmail.el fit together.
>
> Any pointers appreciated.
>
> -- 

When using smtpmail, emacs connects directly to the remote smtp server
and totally bypasses your local smtp server (postfix). Your procmail
is probably the default delivery agent for your local smtp server
(this is the standard config these days). 

This means that your message addressed to user@localhost is being sent
to the remote gmail smtp server, which if correctly configured, should
probably reject the message (i.e. doesn't accept @localhost addresses
unless they come from that machine) or possibly it will attempt to
find a user with that name on that server (but I think this would be
an incorrect configuration). In your example, it would be delivered to
wherever root mail messages are delivered for the remote smtp server -
probably one of the sys admins.

Mail sent via other programs than emacs/gnus don't know about
smtpmail and is using your local smtp server (postfix) and as the mail
is originating locally, accepts the message and passes it to procmail,
which delivers it to the mailbox. 

I recently started using smtpmail because my ISP has placed all their
dynamic IP addresses into various blacklists and messages I sent via
my local smtp server (which was setup as a smarthost that relayed all
non-local mail to my ISP smtp server, would often get rejected by
destination hosts that were using a very strict mail policy which
refuses to accept mail from blacklisted IPs. Many ISPs are doing this
these days to protect themselves from being blacklisted by a customer
who runs a local smtp server which is either misconfigured and gets
abused by a spammer or to send spam themselves. 

I've been running this configuration for a couple of weeks now and it
works quite well. The only downside is that sometimes there can be a
slight delay between sending the mail and getting emacs responding
again - probably due to high loads on the remote smtp server. I have
also configured fetchmail to retrieve my mail from remote imap/pop
mailboxes and hand it directly to procmail. This means I no longer
need to run a mail server at all - which is great as I'm way past
finding maintaining a mail server "fun" and the less I have to
maintain the better. I was running exim as my local mail server as it
is easy to setup. Postfix is probably overkill for a local machine,
unless you have many users and lots of mail traffic. From memory, I
also seem to remember it is a bit difficult to run postfix and NOT
have it run as a daemon listening on prot 25. Many people don't
realise that you only need an smtp server listening on a port if you
are accepting mail from a remote host. Likewise, many people forget
that the mail server (postfix, sendmail, exim etc) don't actually
deliver mail, but instead use a delivery program, such as procmail. 

HTH

Tim
-- 
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au


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