From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Ray Olszewski Subject: Re: sendmail over ppp Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2003 17:27:08 -0800 Sender: linux-newbie-owner@vger.kernel.org Message-ID: <5.1.0.14.1.20031215170432.01fc3d50@celine> References: <20031216010920.30413.qmail@www.linkmania.ro> Mime-Version: 1.0 Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20031216010920.30413.qmail@www.linkmania.ro> List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: linux-newbie@vger.kernel.org At 01:09 AM 12/16/2003 +0000, Szonyi Sebastian Calin wrote: >Hi >I have some questions regarding reading and sending mail >through an ISP. > >Prerequisites: isp uses login and password autentication > >1. How do i read mail from my isp ? should i use fetchmail >for this >without involving sendmail ? >2. how do i send mail with sendmail through my ISP ? >I searched on the internet and i couldn't find how to set >the username and password for sendmail to autenticate to >the smart relay >(I understood that i have to set my ISP as a smart relay >host in >sendmail.cf file ) > >Any poiters to relevant documentation will be apreciated. >(I have documentation for sendmail at home but i'm not sure >i really >have time to read all of it :-) Good answers to your questions have more to do with the details of how your ISP is providing service than with Linux as such. First, receiving mail: If your connection is not on 24/7 (as most dialup-ppp connections are not), you will probably receive your e-mail with an address like yourname@yourisp.com . It will be received by your ISP's mail server and held there for you, for downloading using POP3 (or, possibly, IMAP). In this case, you will need to use a POP3 client to get the mail; fetchmail is the standard client for Linux (though many browsers will act as POP3/IMAP clients too, if you prefer that approach). If I am right in assuming that your ISP gives you access to your e-mail via POP3 or IMAP, then sendmail is irrelevant to your receiving mail. Second, sending mail: If your ISP requires userid/password authentication to send e-mail, it probably uses "pop before smtp". This means that when it gets an smtp connection from you (to send mail), before it accepts the mail it requires you to make a POP3 connection, which provides the password mechanism. (Please note that this is a guess, though -- it is the common way I know to do it, but I have no way to know for certain what *your* ISP actually does.) In practice, on the client side, you comply with this requirement by checking mail before sending a message. Possibly if you set fetchmail to check mail frequently (every 10 minutes, perhaps, plus whenever a ppp connection is initiated), that will be enough to satisfy your ISP ... as I said, all this depends on what your ISP has decided to require, something no one her can tell you. For some general background on POP before SMTP, take a look here to see what one ISP requires: http://www.greencis.net/support/popb4smtp.shtml Unless your ISP blocks outgoing destination-port-25 connections (some do, some don't), you could try using sendmail to send your e-mail directly to its destination, bypassing the ISP's relay. That is a stock sendmail (or exim or postfix or whatever) configuration, requiring nothing special from you ... though you will run into some anti-SPAM rejections if your IP address is on the "dialup list" (DUL) of some of the RBH sites. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.linux-learn.org/faqs