Topic: Another fetchmail and multiple pop problem

[DUNCAN]

We have 8 seperate mail boxes at our isp all with the same domain entry ie sales@xxxx.com.au, enquiries@xxxx.com.au etc.

We collect mail from mail.xxxx.com.au with our user name being the portion before the @ and all passwords are the same.

I have set up the E-Smith server with our qualified domain name and am trying to collect mail for one of our accounts (just as a test before editing /etc/fetchmail to collect for all).

The problem that i keep hitting is that E-Smith goes and sets up its mail settings ie pop, smtp and imap as mail.xxxx.com.au (which are the same as the isp) and it seems that when it does a check (send or receive) it is sending and receiving to itself rather than to the isp.

If i put in a fictitious domain name ie xxxz.com.au it will send and receive correctly but returns the mail to the isp (tries to relay ???) because the mail addresses do not match the fictitious domain portion. (i am only guessing here)

If i ssh to root and try         poll mail.xxxx.com.au -p pop3 -u username
and use the isp password i get an error, if i use my users password (E-Smith) it checks for mail locally (it works correctly if i use a fictitious domain name, but the mail bounces back to the isp).

We are running in server mode thru a smoothwall firewall. The gateways etc are correct because i can browse from e-smith using lynx and collect mail  (albeit incorrectly).

I have searched but found no real answer, but note that others seem to run into the same type of problem.

Any help would be appreciated.

Regards Duncan

[Jochen Hoegerl]

My configuration is as follows:
I created a   " *@mydomain.net" Mailbox at my ISP's Mailserver so any mail
pointing to mydomain.net is stored in this mailbox. The ISP-Mailserver adds an
additional Header "Envelope-to" to each mail with the recipants mailaddress.

I set up my e-smith server to be "mydomain.local" and added a virtual domain
"mydomain.net".
I then configured fetchmail ( multi-drop ) to pull the mail from my ISP-mailbox and sort the mails by "Envelope-to".

As my ISP also hosts my www / ftp Server I added the FQDN's with their
IP-Adr. to my hosts file i.e. www.mydomain.net 152.138.1.13

hope this helps

jochen

[Graeme Robinson]

Duncan,
is your connection permanent with a fixed IP? If so you could safely update your dns record for your domain to point mail directly to your e-smith box and avoid the problems you've got.

If you are stuck with a dynamic IP and/or non-permanent connection you have several options:

- simply let users pop-off their mail directly to their mail clients, only using e-smith mail for sending outbound mail.
- configure .forward for each of the ISP mail accounts and set relevent username@e-smith as the forwarding address (you can get a valid hostname by using a free service like dyndns to reassign your host everytime you connect/ip change).  This is how I configure my mail.  It means e-smith doesn't have to chew bandwidth prompting for mail delivery; it just comes in.  Also I can use IMAP and have remote mail access and the mail is backed up on the server.
- configure e-smith for ETRN or multidrop collection of mail.

[Duncan]

My thanks guys on your suggestions.

I ended up forwarding all our mail to our complementry isp mail box and download from there. No need to hack anything. Mail comes and goes without any troubles.

I think i have jochen to thank for showing me how to get rid of the cron mail i was getting after every pop collection (earlier post)

My only problem now is that i have set up mail collection every 30 minutes. But we dont run connected full time. I wonder if there is a way to get rid of the emails that e-smith sends me complaining that it cant find a DNS entry for the isp mail server when we are not connected (aside from setting up outlook to chuck them in the deleted items folder on collection) ie sending them to /dev/null.

Regards Duncan