Re: Gnus and fetchmail

Re: Gnus and fetchmail

[Kai Großjohann]

Jonas Steverud <d4jonas@dtek.chalmers.se> writes:

> My question now is if fetchmail can deliver to some file which Gnus
> then can read as inbox (and then do splitting) or if I need procmail
> (in MDA mode) too.

I think old versions of fetchmail could deliver directly to a file,
but more recent versions can't, anymore.  You could set up an MTA
(sendmail, say) on your host and then use that from fetchmail.  (The
MTA only needs to be able to deliver local mail.)

Speaking of deliver, I think that Debian comes with a program called
`deliver' which can deliver local mail.

> Any other ideas for the problem "getting (sending) mail and news from
> (to) ISP X to (from) Gnus"? I would like to have two options: 1. Have
> a script in crontab and 2. be able to do it on demand. Both are easy
> to accomplish if I can be able to produce a script that gets the mail
> into /var/spool/mail/$USER, uploads whatever mail I've sent, and do
> the same thing for news.

I think for the uploading mail part an MTA would be useful.  You could
configure the MTA to queue all mail for you and to send it on demand.
(For sendmail, the command would be `sendmail -q'.)

kai
-- 
Beware of flying birch trees.

Re: Gnus and fetchmail

[Thomas Skogestad]

* Jonas Steverud

| My question now is if fetchmail can deliver to some file which Gnus
| then can read as inbox (and then do splitting) or if I need procmail
| (in MDA mode) too.

This is my ~/.fetchmailrc

 # Configuration created Sat Jun 12 13:34:33 1999 by fetchmailconf
 set postmaster "thomas"
 set bouncemail
 set properties ""
 poll munkholm.chembio.ntnu.no via "localhost"
  with proto POP3 port 1027
        user "thomas" there with password "TopSecret" is thomas here options fetchall stripcr warnings 3600
  preconnect '(ssh -n -f munkholm.chembio.ntnu.no -L 1027:munkholm.chembio.ntnu.no:110 sleep 5 ) ; sleep 2'
  mda '/usr/bin/procmail -d thomas'

(The user here/there is probably not needed, but should I ever change
machines I'm fetching mail from, the setup is ready to be easily changed.
("there" is the user name on the foreign machine.))

This uses a SSH tunnel, connects to a foreign machine
(munkholm.chembio.ntnu.no), fetches mail, and uses procmail to write the
mail to /var/spool/mail/thomas

I also have (setq nnmail-spool-file '("/var/spool/mail/thomas")) in my .gnus

| Any other ideas for the problem "getting (sending) mail and news from
| (to) ISP X to (from) Gnus"? I would like to have two options: 1. Have
| a script in crontab and

I have 

 30 01 * * * fetchmail -q > /dev/null 2>&1
 00 07 * * * fetchmail -d 1800 -f /home/thomas/.fetchmailrc

This checks for mail every half hour (1800 seconds), it is turned off
around my bed time, or not...

| 2. be able to do it on demand.

Then I just type "fetchmail" from the prompt.

| uploads whatever mail I've sent, and do the same thing for news.

I use qmail to send mail (which at least is a heck og lot easier to set up
than sendmail). I also have

 (setq message-send-mail-function 'message-send-mail-with-qmail)
 ;; Forces envelope set to this (i.e. where bounced mail is sent)
 (setq message-qmail-inject-args '("-f" "tskogest@jusstud.uio.no"

just to make sure that the right headers are actually set. (The University
(UiO) is where nice, and without telling anybody about this actually
deletes your mail if the envelope from is set to the name of my computer.
(They've also blocked port 25 connections to my machine form anywhere
outside of the local student city net.)

Since I have a permanent connection to the net I have never had to bother
with sending mail in batches as I log on.

-- 
thomas.skogestad@jusstud.uio.no
http://quimby.gnus.org/circus/problem.gif
ftp://ftp.splode.com/pub/users/friedman/emacs-lisp/kill-a-lawyer.el

Re: Gnus and fetchmail

[Daniel Neri]

Thomas Skogestad <tskogest@jusstud.uio.no> writes:

> I use qmail to send mail (which at least is a heck og lot easier to set up
> than sendmail). I also have
> 
>  (setq message-send-mail-function 'message-send-mail-with-qmail)
>  ;; Forces envelope set to this (i.e. where bounced mail is sent)
>  (setq message-qmail-inject-args '("-f" "tskogest@jusstud.uio.no"
> 

I have a similar setup, where incoming mail is fed to my local qmail
server with fetchmail. Outgoing mail is simply queued in a maildir,
until I run "delivermail", which feeds it to my (stinking) ISP.

"delivermail" is a simple script based on "maildirsmtp" from a qmail
add-on package called "serialmail".


Best wishes,
/Daniel

-- 
Daniel Neri
dne@mayonnaise.net

Re: Gnus and fetchmail

[Daniel Pittman]

On 01 May 2000, Jonas Steverud <d4jonas@dtek.chalmers.se> wrote:

[...]

> I am thinking of using fetchmail (and leafnode) to get mail from some
> future ISP (I'm about to leaving my account here at Chalmers and will
> likely get some commercial ISP later this summer) and getting it once
> a day via crontab.

I do this myself, from several scattered accounts. More often than once
a day, admittedly, but it works wonderfully.

> My question now is if fetchmail can deliver to some file which Gnus
> then can read as inbox (and then do splitting) or if I need procmail
> (in MDA mode) too.

You need a mail daemon running on the local machine, providing SMTP
delivery to a mailbox[1] for fetchmail to work. That's the way it's
designed - it just acts as a go-between for a remote mail gathering
point and the local MTA.

> Any other ideas for the problem "getting (sending) mail and news from
> (to) ISP X to (from) Gnus"? I would like to have two options: 1. Have
> a script in crontab and 2. be able to do it on demand. Both are easy
> to accomplish if I can be able to produce a script that gets the mail
> into /var/spool/mail/$USER, uploads whatever mail I've sent, and do
> the same thing for news.

'qmail' and 'serialmail'[2] worked well for me, but that was a while
back. They both require building from source, pretty much, to be usable.

Postfix is my current MTA, and works well. I have it configured to send
mail directly, and if the host is not reachable, to try a fallback
smarthost.

This covers everything I need, but is not the most robust of solutions
except for a semi-permanent connection like I have.

> I really don't think this is hard to do but it is a white spot on the
> map of my knowledge. The main question is: Do I need anything more
> then gnus, fetchmail and leafnode?

An MTA. qmail probably best suits your needs. There is a debian package
for it, although I have not used it.

Feel free to contact me directly if you want some more specific answers.

        Daniel


Footnotes: 
[1]  /var/spool/mail, ~/Mailbox, Maildir, &c.

[2]  I think that's the name of the second package. Check the qmail
     website for details.[3]

[3]  <url:http://qmail.org/>

-- 
If you consistently take an antagonistic approach, however, people are going
to start thinking you're from New York.   :-)
        -- Larry Wall to Dan Bernstein in <10187@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>