Compiling a newer version than the latest .deb package

Cameron Simpson cs at cskk.id.au
Thu Jun 6 08:59:49 UTC 2019


On 06Jun2019 20:47, Frank Watt <youngoldbloke at gmail.com> wrote:
>On 5/06/19 10:37 PM, Nathan Stratton Treadway wrote:
>>On Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 21:30:51 +1200, Frank Watt wrote:
>>>Would that really work?  It's an attractive idea, avoiding the
>>>complications of compiling new code with ancient functionality and
>>>getting rid of sendmail's idiosynchracies. Is there any reason not to
>>>try?
>>
>>Well, the first question is "how does your incoming email get
>>delivered"?  If it's delivered locally to the machine where you are
>>running Mutt, you will need to be sure that sendmail is not involved in
>>delivering it (because nullmailer is specifically designed not to
>>support delivering mail to local mailboxes).
>
>I thought fetchmail had nothing to do with sendmail, but that 
>evidently isn't the case.  I installed nullmailer and fetchmail ceased 
>to work. Does procmail use sendmail?

Procmail generally relies on being installed in the user's ~/.forward 
file to cause sendmail (the mail system) to deliver email to the 
procmail programme instead of the default.

So...

fetchmail collects email and delivered it to the local email system.  
Which means it delivers to sendmail. And sendmail hands it to 
procmail...

However, fetchmail has a -m option, which can probably deliver directly 
to procmail, bypassing the local mail system entirely.

>At least it was simple to get back to where I was by reinstalling 
>sendmail.  So sendmail still works where it used to with fetchmail, 
>but not where it used to work with my ISP's SMTP server :-(

Fiddle fetchmail to deliver to procmail. When that's working, put 
nullmailer back.

>I didn't get Nullmailer to send any mail.  That might be because I 
>screwed up the configuration.  There's not much point figuring that 
>out if I can't use fetchmail.

Yah, debug it second.

>Should I go back to getting qmail (or something else) to replace 
>sendmail?

Qmail is extremely simple, so much so that I find it hard to set up. I 
personally like postfix.

But nullmailer really sounds very promising - it has a queue and 
delivers to a smarthost, which is all most people really need on their 
personal machines.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs at cskk.id.au>


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