retrieving POP3 email using qmail
 

ok really simple question here.... I have a server that is running rh9 I've installed qmail on it as well as djbdns...

I have netsol hosting my email right now and I want my server at home here to go to netsol and get my email and store it until so that I can retreive it from a client like netscape or evolution.

I have looked in all the docs on the internet and have went through the lwq web and I can't see anything on how to do this.

If anyone knows of a good tut or has done something like this I would really appreciate the help..
Thanks,
Flan

man fetchmail (it may not be installed by default, so you might have to install the package).

Qmail is an MTA and it only uses the SMTP protocol. Qmail cannot fetch mail for you or use the POP3 protocol in any way.

then what is qmail-pop3d used for?
Flan

Errr, they added pop3? Last time I used it, it was only an MTA.

Well in that case, it has a POP3 daemon, but that's for your users to retrieve mail from IT, not for IT to retrieve mail from other places. You still need fetchmail or something similar to pull down the mail from your hosting provider.

can I "hook" it into qmail I need the experience

No, but you can run fetchmail from a cron job and I believe you may be able to set it to deliver to /var/spool/mail/user rather than to /home/user/mbox. You will need to consult the documentation for fetchmail.

You're misunderstanding the fundamental operation of MTA software. MTAs only communicate with each other using SMTP in order to route a message to it's final destination. The messages you want to retreive from your ISP have already been delivered to their final destination, it's just that you want to move them from where they were delivered to.

In order to fetch those messages out of a mail store, you need to use a message retrieval protocol, not a message transfer protocol (SMTP is message transfer). Retrieval protocols are POP3 and IMAP4. There are some older protocols that aren't really used any more. Fetchmail supports pop3 and imap4 and it also supports various kinds of authentication. Essentially fetchmail performs the same duties as a mail client like Outlook Express or Evolution, but instead of being an interactive client that someone opens and it displays their messages, it just works in the background to download messages and put them in files for other programs to look at.

Oh so if I were pointing my MX record at the server here then I could use qmail...
cool thanks man,
Flan

Not directly. You would have to forward the mail to your domain (which would have to be done on your account with your hosting provider). Then along as you were forwarding port 25/TCP through your firewall to the box running Qmail, then yes you could accept mail from the Internet. It still wouldn't "fetch" mail for you though, someone would have to send the mail to you (by using your domain name prefixed by a local username).

oh yeah I get that part... I guess I just misunderstood the use of qmail thats all.

thanks,
Flan