🚀 go-pugleaf

Geoff Cox wrote:
> 
> hello,
> 
> I am trying and so far failing to get majordomo/sendmail/fetchmail to
> work on a dialup Internet connection.......!
> 
> Sendmail works OK on its own, fetchmail gets the email form a pop3
> server......but I do not as yet understand how the three work
> together...

Sendmail is an MTA - it usually runs as a daemon, where it listens on
port 25, for incoming SMTP connections. All the mail on the internet
(well, pretty much all) is sent with SMTP. When sendmail receives a
message, it looks at it to decide whether it's to be delivered to a
local user, or forwarded to another SMTP daemon elsewhere on the net.

Most ISP's do not provide SMTP mail delivery to their dial up
subscribers (with the notable exception of Demon) - SMTP is really
intended for always connected hosts, so ISP's expect people to fetch
their mail with POP3. POP3 is purely a mail retrieval protocol, and many
mailers use it.

Fetchmail is a daemon that is capable of retreiving mail via POP3 (or
several other protocols), and resending the same mail with SMTP. As
such, it's often used by dial up users running sendmail - they send mail
via sendmail, and mail is retrieved by fetchmail, which then passes it
to sendmail, as though it had been sent directly.

Majordomo is not a mail daemon of any kind - it's a list server.
Majordomo is a series of perl programs that can manage a mailing list on
any host running sendmail or a similar MTA.

HTH

Mike.