question on mail (sendmail, dovecot, fetchmail)

Tim ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au
Fri Nov 6 17:26:44 UTC 2009


On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 16:34 +0100, roland wrote:
> I installed sendmail, dovecot and fetchmail, configured IMAP
> 
> 1. When I use an email address like info at mydomain.be, after creating the  
> user info, all mail is delivered to root
> After changing the delivery-to => roland, mail for info is delivered to  
> roland.

Is there a problem, or are you saying you succeeded in doing what you
wanted, above?

Editing the /etc/aliases file, and running the newaliases command, lets
you create fake recipient names (they don't need a corresponding actual
user account on the system) and determine who actually gets them (this
recipient does need to be a user on the the system).

e.g. If I put the following into the aliases file:

       sales:  tim
       enquiries:  tim
       support:  tim

Then mail addressed to sales at example.com, enquiries at example.com, and
support at example.com would all be received at tim at example.com, but
there'd only be an actual "tim" user on the system.

Don't get carried away, though. They'll all get dictionary spam.  The
more recipients you create, the more spam you'll get - one to each.

Of course you could stick an extra fake spam magnet recipient in, and
then have your spam filter mark all mail received by it to be 100% spam
without *any* error, and also mark any identical-content mail received
by the other accounts to be 100% spam without any errors.  i.e. You
won't get *any* false positives.  It's a rather simple and effective
system.

> 2. How can I accept mail for info at mydomain.be and deliver it to roland and  
> luc?

Do you mean from the outside world?  You need an ISP that lets you do
that, and plenty of outside ISPs will not deliver mail to user IP
addresses, anyway.  You also need to be knowledgeable about how mail
works, and configuring your system well, so you don't become a spammer's
tool.

> 3. When I send mail, using sendmail, I do not have a folder 'sent' on the  
> IMAP server.
> I mean, if I send mail via evolution and then go to another computer,  
> which has p.e. Outlook Express, the folder 'sent' is not there. The folder  
> inbox is.

It's usually up to the client as to how it deals with keeping copies of
sent mail.  The default is often that the client keeps a local copy, in
its file system, rather than a folder on the IMAP server.  Though
sometimes the client will automatically set up some sort of "sent" mail
folder on the IMAP server.

After years of having to deal with various mail clients each creating
their own separate "sent", "Sent", "sent mail", etc., folders on the
IMAP server, and some only keeping local copies, when using more than
one client on different computers, I've settled on creating a "posted"
folder on the IMAP server with the first client I configure, configuring
it to use that folder to store copies of its sent mail, then configuring
any other mail client to use that same folder, too.  I've yet to see one
automatically create a folder with that name, so I can easily find *MY*
folder out of the numerous default ones that often get created when a
mail client first connects to an IMAP server (along with multiple
"drafts", "Drafts", and "pending" folders).  Grrr....

You can get the same local-only issue with the drafts folder - that each
client keeps only a local copy, and doesn't put it on the IMAP server.
Which can be a nuisance when you start to draft a letter, get
interrupted, then want to resume working on the letter when you're at a
different terminal.

It's issues like that, that make people actually like using the various
abominable webmail services (e.g. Hotmail and Yahoo).  With webmail, you
don't actually set up different clients, you use the one, remotely.

-- 
[tim at localhost ~]$ uname -r
2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686

Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored.  I
read messages from the public lists.






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