On Thu, 2001-09-13 at 22:35, Schoppitsch Dieter wrote: > Hi all! > > It's horrible - I can't install Mail Services on my Laptop. > > I am a single user and have an Email-Account at my ISP. > All I want is to dial in to my ISP and put mails from my laptop to > this mail account and fetch mails from this account to the laptop > (and read and answer offline). > As my laptop is very old (486) and I am not that expert in setting up > I search for small (no X) and simple solution (out of the box). > > The last thing I tried was a mutt/masqmail/fetchmail-combination > without setup-success.
This is two problems. (1) receiving mail, (2) sending mail. I can relate my experience - I don't know if it is any help, but it might be interesting... Firstly, for receiving mail, I use fetchmail. This means that I can use any mail client I like, locally. I run fetchmail in daemon mode, and it checks for my mail every minute. Fetchmail is also triggered when my ppp connection comes up - this is done by the standard Debian install, and you shouldn't need to do any more. For sending mail, I use masqmail. I set up a line for each internet connection location. When each connection comes up I touch a file in the /tmp directory called masqmail.<connection> For ppp connections I did this through adding scripts to /etc/ppp/ip-up.d and /etc/ppp/ip-down.d, and for network connections I use 'whereami' to do this. My minutely cron job then comes along and if it finds /tmp/masqmail.*, and /var/spool/masqmail/local/* then it does a masqmail queue run (masqmail -qo <connection>). I'm sure this sounds all a little complicated, but I have quite a few different places I go to where I want to be able to send and receive mail, and I want it to 'just work' when I arrive there. Here are some of the scripts concerned: ---------------/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/1masmqmail------------------------------ #!/bin/sh # Exit if package was removed but not purged. test -x /usr/sbin/masqmail || exit 0 if [ -n "$PPP_IFACE" ]; then # Set the provider according to the value of PPP_IPPARAM PROVIDER="$PPP_IPPARAM" fi if [ -n "$PROVIDER" ]; then # Record the provider name in a file. This is necessary if we're using # the "online_detect = file" method (cf. /etc/masqmail/masqmail.conf) echo -n "$PROVIDER" > /tmp/connect_route chmod 0644 /tmp/connect_route # When the connection goes up, we flush the MasqMail queue using the route # defined for the provider by "connect_route.$PROVIDER" # in /etc/masqmail/masqmail.conf /usr/sbin/masqmail -qo & fi if grep -qsx "^get.$PROVIDER.*=.*" /etc/masqmail/masqmail.conf; then # optionally fetch mails from POP servers, if a get method is defined # in /etc/masqmail/masqmail.conf /usr/sbin/masqmail -g & fi -------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------/etc/ppp/ip-down.d/1masmqmail------------------------ #!/bin/sh rm /tmp/masqmail.* -------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, the script I run every minute to send any queued mail: ---------------/root/bin/mymail------------------------------------- #!/bin/bash cd /tmp MAILQUEUE=`ls | grep masqmail | cut -f2 -d.` if [ "$MAILQUEUE" = "" ]; then # logger -tmymail "No mail queue active" MAILQUEUE=$MAILQUEUE else if [ `ls /var/spool/masqmail/input/*-H 2>/dev/null | wc -l` -ge 1 ]; then logger -tmymail "Queue '$MAILQUEUE' is active - sending mail" /usr/sbin/masqmail -qo $MAILQUEUE logger -tmymail "Mail sent" fi fi -------------------------------------------------------------------- In my masqmail setup, for each connection I have: connect_route.connection = "/etc/masqmail/connection" and in each /etc/masqmail/connection file, I have something along the lines of: mail_host = mail.connection.co.nz (I think there are newer ways of doing this, but I've been using masqmail for a couple of years). -------------------------------------------------------------------- I hope all this helps somewhat - feel free to ask questions if you want to set yourself up this way. Regards, Andrew. -- _____________________________________________________________________ Andrew McMillan, e-mail: Andrew @ catalyst . net . nz Catalyst IT Ltd, PO Box 10-225, Level 22, 105 The Terrace, Wellington Me: +64(21)635-694, Fax:+64(4)499-5596, Office: +64(4)499-2267xtn709