Re: Gnus and fetchmail

["Daniel Pittman" <daniel@danann.net>]

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/>

-- 
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