From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: pete@dunnington.u-net.com (Peter Turnbull) Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2003 00:31:10 GMT Subject: [pups] Totally off topic question In-Reply-To: Robin Birch "[pups] Totally off topic question" (Mar 21, 23:04) References: Message-ID: <10303220031.ZM25050@mindy.dunnington.u-net.com> On Mar 21, 23:04, Robin Birch wrote: > I am probably going to get a broadband connection to wherever I end up. > I will then network all of the various boxes together and connect > everything (including the PDP) to the Internet. I intend having one box > set up as a server [...] > In case the above seems stupid the idea is to take all email through a > server, weed out all incoming rubbish, and route it to various > individual's (partner, daughter etc.) PCs. This is exactly what I do, though I have the sending and receiving sides of the email equation separate. I have one machine that acts as a mail hub. It runs sendmail with a custom sendmail.cf which is capable of delivering internal mail either to /var/mail, which is then exported to other machines, or via UUCP or SMTP to other machines. It also batches up outgoing mail and sends it to my ISP's mail server ("Smart Host") at specific times of the day (mine's not an always-on connection). All the other machines either use UUCP, or use sendmail with the "nullclient" .cf file, to send mail to my hub machine. No reason why the hub couldn't run a POP3 server for the benefit of Windoze PCs as well, but I've never felt the need :-) If you go that route, I'd suggest you think about IMAP rather than POP, though. As far as getting mail from my ISP, I use fetchmail -- but if you do this, be sure that your ISP puts something in the headers that makes it easy for fetchmail to tell which user it's really for (don't forget about mailing lists), and that you have a catchall rule to handle mail you didn't think of. If you have an always-on connection, you could have your DNS MX record(s) set to point to your hub machine, and needn't use fetchmail. However, if you do that, be sure to set up sendmail with anti-relaying and all the proper security patches. -- Pete Peter Turnbull Network Manager University of York