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Stupid Hint - Automatically retrieve received emails into Mail
Authored by: seunghun on Nov 30, '03 03:05:39AM

While I applaud ingenuity of this hint, it's of no use to crapload of people.

I mean how many people have a mail server that you can log into?

People have webmails nowadays. It's lucky to have a POP or IMAP account anywhere.

If you have corporate account, chances are, your mail is running on exchange.

Let's say your mail server runs unix. And let's just say you have a shell account at there. and that's a huge if. What is the chance that your site runs procmail? I know I don't. It's buggy and insecure. I ain't trusting my users with it.

Even if your mail server is running procmail. In fact. let's assume that you are a university student or something of the sort. Hell, then you might as well run mutt on the damn mail server. You have a shell access to it, anyhow.

Mostly, what this hint pisses me off the most is that it was only into the middle of the hint that i understood what was going on - and what the requirements are. Most of the people reading this hint haven't much idea about procmail or xinetd. The author should have told upfront what this hint requires - a dream configuration.

Christ, you might as well as run your own damn mail server. (Which is more trouble than it's worth, trust me. Not on residential IP you better not try to; AOL and the big players will deny mails from your mail server.)



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Stupid Hint - Automatically retrieve received emails into Mail
Authored by: cynikal on Nov 30, '03 02:48:36PM

While you have a valid point that most people don't have login access to their email server and that a lot of people have webmail nowadays, i'd have to disagree that most people use exchange server. There's quite a few people that do, but i think the majority of mail servers are still on Unix. Like you, i have no hard numbers to back this up either way.

As for procmail, i don't know why you claim it's insecure. Maybe you're thinking of sendmail? Now that's a security nightmare. Any one program that has so many tasks isn't a good idea from a security standpoint.

And actually I do run my own mail server and it's not all that much of a nightmare :-P it's actually quite straightforward, try postfix, you can have a mail server up in less than 10 minutes (including compilation time).

Why would you want to log onto the server to run mutt/pine/elm, that's way unintuitive in the point-and-click realm. Then again, I still run elm when i need to do something with attachments on the mail server end.

But in any event, the author definately should have mentioned the requirements at the beginning:

1.) a mail server you can log into running unix
2.) procmail on that server
3.) a publicly reachable ip address on the mac running mail (if you're behind a firewall, you won't normally be able to have the script triggered)

these three things aren't that hard to find, and in most cases a work around can be found (like port forwarding on the firewall).



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Stupid Hint - Automatically retrieve received emails into Mail
Authored by: seunghun on Nov 30, '03 06:54:08PM

i used to use qmail and read all of my mails on mutt. (using fetchmail for a while as well as my own account on the server) I still read my mails on mutt. No procmail was involved; I am actually a fan of Maildir.

My point about having own mail server is that AOL and a few other ISP have started blocking mails from residential IP as an anti-spam measure. Go ahead and try to send an email to your AOL friend. It'll get bounced because you are on a residential email. In my case, I needed to send a bunch of emails to a group of people, which a large percentage of used AOL. It just became too much hassle.



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Stupid Hint - Automatically retrieve received emails into Mail
Authored by: rotaiv on Dec 01, '03 07:36:49AM

I run my own mail server (with sendmail and procmail) on a residential IP and personally, I don't think I'd every want to use an ISP's mail server again! The point about outgoing mail from residential IP is valid but that is not to say you even have to use your mail server for outgoing email.

What I do is configure my clients to use my ISP's official SMTP server for *outgoing* and use my own mail server (via dyndns.org) for *incoming* mail. This has worked great for me and while I have had some minor issues, it has been a lot less than my previous ISP.



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