[gentoo-user] sanity check: fetchmail exim courier-*

[Michael Higgins]

Hi all —

First question, where is $MAIL set for the users? It is set now
to /var/mail/[user] somehow, or is by default. If so, where is that set?
Anyway, I need to change to ~/.maildir. If not set to change, where
should I set it?

The situation (needing a reality check) is we have an ISP that gives
small mailboxes. We need to empty them. I work in many locations and
have several of these accounts that can fill quickly.

I have been leaving mail on the ISP server and using fetchmail to pull
to storage in my local user account ~/.maildir whenever I got a 'quota
warning'. If I needed any of these emails after the fact, I could open
with nail and forward. ('mail' seems to work if I reset $MAIL var as
above...)

Next, I thought to make these available via IMAP, so set up exim and
courier. I can't get IMAP to work, not sure why (perhaps Q#1 above
is related? Duh...). But at this point I can send email via smtp and
receive via pop3. SMTP is limited to within the network the pop3 is
working from anywhere. And local delivery works too.

So, I'll just set up a cron job for my user to run fetchmail on the
various accounts so to keep my ISP storage empty and pull the emails
via POP3 (until I get IMAP working).

Anything obviously awry with this kind of setup? Local users can send
via inside the net, world users can reply to email originating on the
machine. Setting the email address in the mail client to the ISP mail
address means failed emails and replies come back to the user... (and
SMTP doesn't also reject for failed reverse DNS lookup)... does
this seem all good? '-)

Cheers,

-- 
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 michael.higgins[at]evolone[dot]org
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