James Knott wrote:
Anton Aylward wrote:
If you are the only user there is no need for Postfix to process incoming mail.
Outgoing, that's another matter: queueing, determining which SMTP server, error handling.
At work, I was planning on using the existing SMTP server and just using fetchmail to get POP mail from them for the IMAP server, just like I do at home.
That's exactly what i do w/my ISP -- cept they run IMAP as well. I'm still using 'sendmail', but I won't try to convince anyone how great it is! -- it does work, though, usually. ;-) So haven't desired to 'fix it' by changing over to postfix.. But I don't think it would be good to try to run w/o a mail daemon. When cron jobs, or at scripts, or any other processes run and send mail, do you really them to send status or fault email that's probably addressed to 'postmaster' or root at 'locahost', some 'ISP' and hope that they will know that since the email came from your machine, then local host would mean send it to your queue? I doubt many (if any) ISP's would try to implement such... There have been times (very recently) when my username wouldn't resolve (I've been using samba/winbind for account resolution, and I haven't had samba working correctly since I upgraded to 11.4 in April (a led to b, b led to c, c led to d, etc... )... This happened for about ... maybe 16 hours before I caught the problem. How did I catch it? No incoming email. But fetchmail was running... sendmail was just 'queuing it' (had been told not to bounce, but continue trying for some number of days...). Once I fixed the user-account lookup, the email started pouring in from queue -- maybe 2-4 hundred (get a couple to several hundred/day depending on whether or not my 'lkml' sub it active at the time... ;-) (lkml=linux kernel mailing list -- high volume)... Nice thing about having email in standard formats, you can write own own little stat progs:
ll daily_stats hourly_stats -rwxr-x--- 1 40 Jun 7 2005 daily_stats* -rwxr-x--- 1 834 Sep 27 2005 hourly_stats* # emails/day by date daily_stats|tail 188 20110819 279 20110820 354 20110821 496 20110822 520 20110823 503 20110824 401 20110825 449 20110826 293 20110827 312 20110828
emails received by hour: as a graph for past 48 hours:
hourly_stats |tail -48 20110826:19 ****************** 20110826:20 ********** 20110826:21 ***** 20110826:22 ********** 20110826:23 *************** 20110827:00 ********** 20110827:01 ************ 20110827:02 ************* 20110827:03 ****** 20110827:04 ****** 20110827:05 ********************** 20110827:06 ****************** 20110827:07 ******************** 20110827:08 ************************* 20110827:09 ****************************** 20110827:10 **************** 20110827:11 ************* 20110827:12 ****************** 20110827:13 ************ 20110827:14 ****** 20110827:15 ************ 20110827:16 ************* 20110827:17 ************ 20110827:18 ********* 20110827:19 ** 20110827:20 ***** 20110827:21 **** 20110827:22 * 20110827:23 ******** 20110828:00 ************** 20110828:01 ***************** 20110828:02 ************* 20110828:03 ************* 20110828:04 *************** 20110828:05 ******************** 20110828:06 ************* 20110828:07 ************************************* 20110828:08 ************************************ 20110828:09 ***************** 20110828:10 ************* 20110828:11 ************ 20110828:12 ************************ 20110828:13 ******************** 20110828:14 ******* 20110828:15 *** 20110828:16 ******* 20110828:17 *************
Still working after 6 years... (when my email sorting prog stores a message, it. Those scripts are trivial shell scripts that process the log file writes a 1 line log message that looks like:
tail -3 mail/.log 20110828:184935 (Sun) SPAM tagged mail , Supposedly to
, thru . mail (***SPAM*** Fat Burning Furnace) received ("fbf" ) (2.11sec processing) 20110828:185035 (Sun) OpenSuSE mail (Re: [opensuse] installing openSUSE on an older pc)[CLEANED] received (larry stotler ) (2.12sec processing) 20110828:185935 (Sun) OSuSE Proj & Factory mail (Re: [opensuse-factory] Re: gdk-pixbuf/gdk-pixbuf.h: No such file or directory)[CLEANED] received (ilya chernykh ) (2.34sec processing)
The one's that say 'CLEANED' have the "[listname]" from the subject, It's annoying to open a folder 'OpenSuse', and see [opensuse] at the start of every subject -- doesn't really add much to a subject. So... by running a mail server, you can get some flexibility and reliability that you might might find difficult to do otherwise, but keeping it all running can be 'educational' at times... -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org