Re: tlug: One step forwared, one step back.

[Chris Sekiya <chris@example.com>]

On Fri, 13 Nov 1998, Dave Gutteridge wrote:

> With everyone's help and my own digging around, i finally figured out
> a lot about my POP mail server thingy. It turns out that it's DPOP,
> and it's from a company called NetWin (netwinsite.com). I had to
> e-mail in a registration to get a key which basically got it running
> again.

Let me see if I understand this right:

RedHat is shipping a distribution that installs, by default, a POP server
that requires registration (and is therefore binary-only)?

That sounds suspicious.

> Way, way before, when i was first trying to get this whole e-mail
> thing to go, i sent an e-mail to test@example.com, and then by
> telnet'ing in and using pine, i could see the e-mail that had gotten
> there. Now, after having gotten the DPOP thingy up and running i can
> no longer do this. When i send an e-mail TO test@example.com (by using
> Eudora from my NT machine) i get no errors and it disappears. When i
> log into test's account and use pine, there is nothing in the in-box.

This is bad.

This is the way things are supposed to work:

When someone sends email to you, their mailer will attempt to relay the
message by connecting to your mail server's SMTP port.

The sendmail daemon listens on the SMTP port.  When it receives a message,
it checks a few things and then passes it along to your mail-delivery
agent (usually procmail).

Procmail checks a few things, and then stashes the message in
/var/spool/mail/(username)

Your mail will normally sit right there waiting for you.

When you try to read your email via POP, your email program connects to
the POP port.

The POP port is watched by the POP server.  When it realizes that you want
to access your mail, it makes sure that you are really you and sends the
contents of /var/spool/mail/(username) along to your email program, then
wipes /var/spool/mail/(username) (the erase bit is configurable -- yes,
gurus, I know it's more complicated than that but we're keeping it simple
here).

If your mail is disappearing from your mail spool without your
consent/knowledge, I would look _really_ hard at your POP server.

If I were you, I would replace that DPOP monstrosity with qpopper or
similar.

> Then i tried to send FROM test@example.com using pine when logged in as
> test, and it said "can't access /usr/sbin/sendmail : permission denied".

Execute permissions problem on /usr/sbin/sendmail

-- Chris

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