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On Thu, 29 Jan 1998, Daniel Mashao wrote:
> Does anybody have an idea of how to best set-up an offline email system? I
> cannot find suitable information from the man pages etc.
Setting up email on a UNIX system can be a challenge as it involves
configuring a number of different programs to co-operate with one another.
While this may be a bit of work, it provides a great deal of flexibility.
> What I want is the system that I can 'send' email while my machine is
> off-line and then sometime later when I use a ppp connection, my system
> will then send the email outside. I have tried both smail and sendmail
> unfortunately they just write error messages about the email address not
> being reachable etc.
>
> I can use netscape but I have several users on my machine and it would not
> be economical to let each person connect separately or for too long.
You may want to consider using uucp as a mail transport system between you
and your Internet provider. It requires a little more setup at your end
and at the end of your Internet Provider, but it has a number of
advantages:
1) You can have as many mail user-ids as you want on your system and you
don't have to ask your Internet provider to do anything to add/delete
mail accounts as you are in charge of this yourself.
2) Mail transfers between your system and your Internet Provider's system
are automated. (I have my system check every 15 minutes to see if
there is any outgoing email. If there is, it establishes a uucp
connection and exchanges email with my Internet Provider. Otherwise,
it polls my Internet Provider on an hourly basis to see if there is
any incoming email). The connections and transfers are quite short
and efficient.
3) You can set up mailing list software such as majordomo or smart list
on your Linux box and have it work well with this type of setup.
This is possible, because you are the one assigning mail user-ids
instead of your Internet Provider. Your Internet Provider just
forwards all email that is identified as going to your machine.
There are a number of documents/books that you may find useful:
a) Sendmail+UUCP mini-HOWTO
b) The "bat book" by Eric Allan (it's the O'Reilly Sendmail book
with a bat on the front cover).
c) Taylor uucp documentation. The doc's that come with Taylor's
uucp are really very good. I believe they are in info format.
d) O'Reilly's uucp book is also quite good.
e) The BSDi web site had a good document on the nuts and bolts of
setting this up from an Internet Provider's standpoint. The
URL for this used to be:
http://www.bsdi.com/support/faq/BSD_OS-2.1/sendmail-doc.etx
but it may have changed, as last time I looked at it was back in
July/97.
Finally, if you want, I can send you some notes and example uucp and
sendmail configuration files to use as a starting point. (I've helped a
few people do this before and kept a copy of the stuff I sent them.)
Best regards,
Nick
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Nick Busigin <Sent from my Debian/GNU Linux Machine> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To obtain my pgp public key, email me with the subject: "get pgp-key"
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