[KLUG Members] Sendmail as POP3?

[Robert G. Brown]

>Is it possible to make Sendmail act as a POP3 server?
Well... sorta, maybe, kinda... but you don't really want to...

What I sense you REALLY want is a POP3 CLIENT what will run around to all 
of the POP3 servers you are using, get any mail waiting for you, and then 
sendthem to your local mail server for local delivery.
.
>It sounds counterintuitive, I guess, with it being called SENDmail, so let me
>explain what I'm trying to do.
Well, superficially, it does; anyone familair with sendmail knows it both 
sends mail (to other mail servers) and receives mail (from other mail servers,
using SMTP or rather closely related protocl).

What I beleive you want to use is a package called FETCHMAIL. It does
EXACTLY what you're looking for, and more, too!

>To help combat spam, it might be helpful if I could have a POP3 server block
>certain IP addresses.  Those address lists are available, etc. etc.
I am not clear on how you think this will help your spam situation...

>I have several POP3 servers available on the web.  I'd like to keep them as is
>(they're linked with domain names, etc.).
That's right... all you want is a software component that will poll these 
periodically and get any mail that's there.

>I have a Linux box inside a local network that is sending mail from all the
>other internal boxes out to the appropriate places on the web.  So if machine
>192.168.0.7 wants to send mail, the mail is sent to machine 192.168.0.8 (linux
>box) which has Sendmail configured to receive email from there and send it on
>its way (through a firewall) out to the wild, wild web.
All fine and understood.

>Can I do -more- to that Sendmail box so that it goes to the POP3 servers on the
>web, grabs the mail from there, filters out the bad ip addresses and acts as a
>POP3 server to all the internal machines?
Sendmail and fetchmail coexistest very nicely on the same machine, or you can 
run fetchmail on a different host and send the collected mail to the LAN mail
server. Configuration is pretty straightforward, and it all ships with several
popular distributions.

Fetchmail is also well-know for having been the case study for many or Eric 
Raymond's observations about the Free Software Community.
							Regards,
							---> RGB <---