Skip to Content
Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition
book

Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition

by Æleen Frisch
August 2002
Beginner
1176 pages
36h 52m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Essential System Administration, 3rd Edition

Retrieving Mail Messages

As we’ve already seen, sites that connect intermittently to the Internet can complicate mail relaying and delivery. The central issue for such sites is the method for forcing mail to be sent and retrieved periodically in some automated way. Basically, the local queue needs to be flushed (e.g., via sendmail -q or postfix flush) when the connection is made, and mail for local users needs to be retrieved. (Of course, these two processes can be handled by different servers and so need not happen at the same time). Sending local mail is easily handled by adding the appropriate command to the connection script (or creating a script that activates the connection, flushes the queue, and then terminates the connection).

Retrieving mail can be performed manually via the SMTP ETRN command on remote servers that allow SMTP connections and support the enhanced SMTP protocol. Here is an example:

# telnet kevin.ahania.com 25
Trying 10.0.19.223...
Connected to kevin.
Escape character is `^]'.
220 kevin.ahania.com ESMTP Sendmail 8.11.0/8.11.0; 
Mon, 16 Apr 2001 11:22:54 -0400
EHLO astarte
250 kevin.ahania.com Hello astarte
...
ETRN mailhost.zoas.org

The final command requests mail for the specified host.

The fetchmail program, written by Eric Raymond, provides automated mail retrieval capabilities. It is a powerful program that supports a variety of transport protocols and authentication mechanisms. It operates by retrieving messages from a remote mail server and sending them ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Unix® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition

Unix® and Linux® System Administration Handbook, Fourth Edition

Evi Nemeth, Garth Snyder, Trent R. Hein, Ben Whaley

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596003439Errata Page