At my previous employer we used mda on our Ubuntu-based machines, but this
is not available in Gentoo. It did extactly what I am looking for...
Hey list,
I am looking for an as-simple-as-possible setup for local mail delivery.
What I mean by that is: the mail shall go into /var/spool/mail locally,
which is why I deem it overkill to set up and run a complicated smtpd
daemon with its own config file language.
At my previous employer we used mda on our Ubuntu-based machines, but this
is not available in Gentoo. It did extactly what I am looking for: receive mail (most importantly from cron) via pipe and put it right into the spool file, so I can see a message upon login and read it with mutt. That’s all
I need, so I can get summary reports of zfs snapshots, smartd messages and
so on.
I was looking through wiki articles, but they all employ the usual beasts postfix, courier and so on. Do you have any recommendations?
Much obliged.
I thought the gentoo default mail program is nullmailer? Changed from
smtpd(? or something named similar) some time back. Simple, reasonably versatile and has easy configuration.
On Sunday, 12 December 2021 23:36:33 GMT William Kenworthy wrote:
I thought the gentoo default mail program is nullmailer? Changed fromThat's a sending program, not receiving.
smtpd(? or something named similar) some time back. Simple, reasonably
versatile and has easy configuration.
Hey list,
I am looking for an as-simple-as-possible setup for local mail
delivery. What I mean by that is: the mail shall go into
/var/spool/mail locally, which is why I deem it overkill to set up
and run a complicated smtpd daemon with its own config file language.
mail-client/mailx provides /usr/bin/mail which can be used for looking
at mail in/var/spool/mail/ and for sending it to local users. No configuration necessary. cron and other software will automatically
use it.
On 2021-12-12 14:25+0100 Frank Steinmetzger <Warp_7@gmx.de> wrote:
Hey list,
I am looking for an as-simple-as-possible setup for local mail
delivery. What I mean by that is: the mail shall go into
/var/spool/mail locally, which is why I deem it overkill to set up
and run a complicated smtpd daemon with its own config file language.
mail-client/mailx provides /usr/bin/mail which can be used for looking
at mail in /var/spool/mail/ and for sending it to local users. No configuration necessary. cron and other software will automatically use
it.
Using strace, I found out that mail from mailx puts those mail into /var/spool/clientmqueue/, one file per mail, but not in a maildir structure.
In many places I read that system mail—by default—goes into /var/spool/mail/<user>, but until now I’ve yet to observe this behavior.
Am Mon, Dec 13, 2021 at 10:34:08PM +0100 schrieb Frank Steinmetzger:
Using strace, I found out that mail from mailx puts those mail into /var/spool/clientmqueue/, one file per mail, but not in a maildir structure.
OK, I found out that this is the usual outgoing queue which needs to
be processed by sendmail, probably through another cronjob or a
process that itself checks that directory periodically.
In many places I read that system mail—by default—goes into /var/spool/mail/<user>, but until now I’ve yet to observe this
behavior.
It’s really not easy to find a description of the default setup of
olden days (or I’m simply using the wrong search terms). Because when
you search for something like unix local mail setup, most results are
about setting up an SMTP server. In hindsight—perhaps that is simply
the way to go. :-/
Using strace, I found out that mail from mailx puts those mail into
/var/spool/clientmqueue/, one file per mail, but not in a maildir structure.
OK, I found out that this is the usual outgoing queue which needs to be processed by sendmail, probably through another cronjob or a process that itself checks that directory periodically.
In many places I read that system mail—by default—goes into
/var/spool/mail/<user>, but until now I’ve yet to observe this behavior.
It’s really not easy to find a description of the default setup of olden days (or I’m simply using the wrong search terms). Because when you search for something like unix local mail setup, most results are about setting up an SMTP server. In hindsight—perhaps that is simply the way to go. :-/You will quite likely need a Mail Transfer Agent to receive the email,
I am looking for an as-simple-as-possible setup for local mail
delivery.
So one thing that's annoyed me for a while is that there are several
things which will pull in nullmailer to accept local mails, but don't
pull in anything to do local delivery (And I'm not sure if nullmailer
can even pass things to local delivery) so your local delivery mails
by default just stack up in the nullmailer outbound queue unless you configure it to pass them off to an external mail system.
Since the most commonly used of these programs are things like cron
where local delivery is probably the only thing most users would
care about it might be nice if the default configuration were one
that does that, and then those who want local mail relayed elsewhere
still don't have any significant extra setup work to do.
Hey list,
I am looking for an as-simple-as-possible setup for local mail delivery.
What I mean by that is: the mail shall go into /var/spool/mail locally,
which is why I deem it overkill to set up and run a complicated smtpd
daemon with its own config file language.
At my previous employer we used mda on our Ubuntu-based machines, but this
is not available in Gentoo.
Just for the record and completeness’ sake: ... I found out that the program was actually called dma -- the DragonFly BSD mail transport
agent, not mda.
On 12/18/21 4:00 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
Just for the record and completeness’ sake: ... I found out that the program was actually called dma -- the DragonFly BSD mail transport
agent, not mda.
Thank you for sharing your find Frank.
The DragonFly BSD MTA looks interesting. I'll have to check it out. Especially if it's small and intended for local delivery and / or getting messages off of box all the while without exposing an SMTP port.
On 12/18/21 4:00 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
Just for the record and completeness’ sake: ... I found out that the program was actually called dma -- the DragonFly BSD mail transport
agent, not mda.
Thank you for sharing your find Frank.
The DragonFly BSD MTA looks interesting. I'll have to check it out. Especially if it's small and intended for local delivery and / or getting messages off of box all the while without exposing an SMTP port.
There is one last niggle: after I read a message with the mail tool, it
saves those messages in /root/mbox.
There is one last niggle: after I read a message with the mail tool,
it saves those messages in /root/mbox. It does not do this on Arch,
but keeps them in /var/spool/mail/root instead.
On 12/20/21 12:08 PM, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
There is one last niggle: after I read a message with the mail tool, it saves those messages in /root/mbox. It does not do this on Arch, but
keeps them in /var/spool/mail/root instead.
This sounds like the doing of your mail user agent.
The MTA+LDA receive and deliver the mail (respectively) to the user's mailbox.
The MUA is what reads / modifies the mailbox.
So ... compare the email client that you're using between the two systems.
But the latter mails were missing vital headers and thus mail had a
problem displaying them properly.
That sounds like raw, unprocessed email to me.
Delivery works on both systems
(with a little caveat, see second-last paragraph).
At first I believed that both systems used mail from GNU mailutils.
But I erred:
My Gentoo NAS only has mailutils installed. But while I have that also installed on Arch, I was in fact using s-nail’s mail program there. Mailutils installs its mail as /usr/bin/gnu-mail instead, which allows
both packages to co-exist (which Gentoo does not).
So I tried gnu-mail on Arch, but this does not move read mail away
upon exit like its Gentoo cousin.
I did more trials, wrote a lengthy description of it into this message
and threw them away again, so I wouldn’t bore you.
In the end I gave up, removed Gentoo’s mailutils and went with
s-nail. And now it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe building dma from source broke some stuff, because it installed
into /usr/local. `echo foo | mail root` (mail from mailutils) produces
mail that remains in dma’s queue, whereas `echo bar | sendmail root` (/usr/local/sbin/ sendmail from dma) gets the mail delivered to the
spool file.
But the latter mails were missing vital headers and thus mail had a
problem displaying them properly.
It’s all a bit voodoo-esque to my simple-minded user’s point of
view; confusion over many implementations of the same standard;
they should interoperate,
but maybe don’t, or maybe I did not configure them properly.
plus the overly complex configs and info documentation on GNU’s
side which keeps me away. It must have been great days back in the
80s. I wish I had experienced those times and machines.
You mean the body sans envelope?
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