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Re: mail merge - how?!



On Thu, 14 May 1998, Tuvik Beker wrote:

> I have three hosts that are currently independent with regard to mail
> managment. All three have full network connectivity and wach handles its
> own mail. Since they share the same user space it seems a good idea to
> merge their mail.

Well, I'm not an expert, but I have done something like that with TWO
hosts. The question is, what are the domains of the email addresses ? If
each user has ONE public (FQDN) email address, and is himself on any
machine, then you need to set up 1 or 2 (for backup) MX hosts for FQDN
mail, with mail directories mounted over NFS (yes, I know it's dangerous),
OR configure all the mail clients to suck POP from the current MX machine
(#1 usually). All of the linux mail clients know how to POP, including
pine. 'mail' and 'headers' can't pop.

When sending mail for an unqualified user, the sendmail incantations must
rewrite the domain to be the FQDN for any user from any machine (including
the MX #1 one).

This can be done in 2 ways:

1. Rule set in sendmail.cf to do this (simple).
2. .forward mechanism in each user's home directory on each machine, to
forward to the FQDN address on MX #1 (complex, depends on users).

MX #2 is set up as forwarder to spool mail in case MX #1 dies
unexpectedly. Mail is never read from #2, it is forwarded in bulk to #1
asap. 

I understand that some ISPs that are very distributed, hold the user
directories compressed somewhere on a server, and mount them on-the-fly
when the user logs in, on the machine (node) where he logs in. This is for
users with small user directories (contain only setups and such). 

Peter