how to set up my "fetchmail" on f20 without sendmail?

[Robert P. J. Day]

   finally getting around to building my new f20 machine and, as i
read it, f20 now ships without sendmail.

   so far, to match what i've used for years, i've installed on my
f20 box:

   * alpine
   * fetchmail

and i've copied over from my old (ubuntu) system the relevant files:

   * .addressbook{,.lu}
   * .pinerc
   * .fetchmailrc

i can check that there is mail waiting at my ISP with:

   $ fetchmail -c

and sure enough, there's a pile of mail there. however, not
surprisingly, if i try to fetch it, i get:

fetchmail: Connection errors for this poll:
name 0: connection to localhost:smtp [::1/25] failed: Connection refused.
name 1: connection to localhost:smtp [127.0.0.1/25] failed: Connection  
refused.
fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed

since (obviously), without sendmail, nothing is listening on port
25. so what's the solution these days? a pointer to a web page
somewhere would work just fine. thanks.

rday

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 13:55:14 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>     finally getting around to building my new f20 machine and, as i
>  read it, f20 now ships without sendmail. 
By default. Of course, you could install sendmail, which is still
available.
 
>     so far, to match what i've used for years, i've installed
> on my
>  f20 box:
>  
>     * alpine
>     * fetchmail
>  
>  and i've copied over from my old (ubuntu) system the relevant files:
>  
>     * .addressbook{,.lu}
>     * .pinerc
>     * .fetchmailrc
>  
>  i can check that there is mail waiting at my ISP with:
>  
>     $ fetchmail -c
>  
>  and sure enough, there's a pile of mail there. however, not
>  surprisingly, if i try to fetch it, i get:
>  
>  fetchmail: Connection errors for this poll:
>  name 0: connection to localhost:smtp [::1/25] failed: Connection refused.
>  name 1: connection to localhost:smtp [127.0.0.1/25] failed: Connection  
>  refused.
>  fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed
>  
>  since (obviously), without sendmail, nothing is listening on port
>  25. so what's the solution these days? a pointer to a web page
>  somewhere would work just fine. thanks. 
Depends on whether you need sendmail for how you use fetchmail.
I run fetchmail with option   mda "/usr/bin/procmail -t -f -"
to deliver (and filter) via procmail.

[Robert P. J. Day]

Quoting Michael Schwendt <mschwendt(a)gmail.com&gt;:

>  On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 13:55:14 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
> >    finally getting around to building my new f20 machine and, as i
> > read it, f20 now ships without sendmail.
>
>  By default. Of course, you could install sendmail, which is still
>  available.
>
> >    so far, to match what i've used for years, i've installed on my
> > f20 box:
> >
> >    * alpine
> >    * fetchmail
> >
> > and i've copied over from my old (ubuntu) system the relevant files:
> >
> >    * .addressbook{,.lu}
> >    * .pinerc
> >    * .fetchmailrc
> >
> > i can check that there is mail waiting at my ISP with:
> >
> >    $ fetchmail -c
> >
> > and sure enough, there's a pile of mail there. however, not
> > surprisingly, if i try to fetch it, i get:
> >
> > fetchmail: Connection errors for this poll:
> > name 0: connection to localhost:smtp [::1/25] failed: Connection refused.
> > name 1: connection to localhost:smtp [127.0.0.1/25] failed: Connection
> > refused.
> > fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed
> >
> > since (obviously), without sendmail, nothing is listening on port
> > 25. so what's the solution these days? a pointer to a web page
> > somewhere would work just fine. thanks.
>
>  Depends on whether you need sendmail for how you use fetchmail.
>  I run fetchmail with option   mda "/usr/bin/procmail -t -f -"
>  to deliver (and filter) via procmail. 
   hmmm ... i may try that. i assume that, with this approach, i
won't need to install sendmail, correct? and if i choose to use
procmail, will this simply deliver mail for me locally even
before i start to configure my procmail rules? thanks.

rday

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 14:32:17 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>  > I run fetchmail with option   mda "/usr/bin/procmail -t -f
> -"
>  > to deliver (and filter) via procmail.
>  
>     hmmm ... i may try that. i assume that, with this approach, i
>  won't need to install sendmail, correct? 
Correct.

>  and if i choose to use
>  procmail, will this simply deliver mail for me locally even
>  before i start to configure my procmail rules? thanks. 
Yes, that's default behaviour. Quoting from the first paragraph in
"man procmail":

 | If no rcfile is found, or processing of the rcfile falls off the end,
 | procmail will store the mail in the default system mailbox.

[Heinz Diehl]

On 25.12.2013, Michael Schwendt wrote: 

>  > > I run fetchmail with option   mda "/usr/bin/procmail
> -t -f -"
>  > > to deliver (and filter) via procmail.
>  > 
>  >    hmmm ... i may try that. i assume that, with this approach, i
>  > won't need to install sendmail, correct? 
 
>  Correct. 
Using MUAs like Alpine, Mutt and similar, it may probably be a bad idea to not
install any local MTA, unless your MUA can deliver mail directly to
your ISP. And even if it can - it's quite comfortable to read mail
while the mail I just sent gets processed in the background.

I've been using ELM for quite a while together with sendmail, and
changed to mutt and postfix after they came up. The years went by, and
I'm still using my fetchmail-postfix-procmail-mutt combination..

In short: having a local MTA is more of a personal preference.

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Wed, 25 Dec 2013, Michael Schwendt wrote:

>  On Tue, 24 Dec 2013 14:32:17 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
>
>  > > I run fetchmail with option   mda "/usr/bin/procmail -t -f -"
>  > > to deliver (and filter) via procmail.
>  >
>  >    hmmm ... i may try that. i assume that, with this approach, i
>  > won't need to install sendmail, correct?
>
>  Correct.
>
>  > and if i choose to use
>  > procmail, will this simply deliver mail for me locally even
>  > before i start to configure my procmail rules? thanks.
>
>  Yes, that's default behaviour. Quoting from the first paragraph in
>  "man procmail":
>
>   | If no rcfile is found, or processing of the rcfile falls off the end,
>   | procmail will store the mail in the default system mailbox. 
  yup, everything working fine, happy happy joy joy.

rday

-- 

========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day                                 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
LinkedIn:                               http://ca.linkedin.com/in/rpjday
========================================================================

[Wolfgang S. Rupprecht]

"Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday(a)crashcourse.ca&gt; writes:
>  since (obviously), without sendmail, nothing is listening on port
>  25. so what's the solution these days? a pointer to a web page
>  somewhere would work just fine. thanks. 
Since mail at your ISP is most likely going to all go to one user,
piping it into a full-blown MTA is overkill.  I just have ISP imaps mail
placed into the user's mbox directly with getmail(1).  I run getmail out
of the user's own crontab twice an hour.

   yum install getmail

-wolfgang