From lee@NETSPACE.ORG Fri Jan 26 07:28:32 1996 Date: Sat, 13 Jan 1996 01:11:23 -0500 From: Lee Silverman To: Multiple recipients of list BIG-LINUX Subject: Re: Mailbox Routing help The original poster had two requirements, the second of which was that the "remote" machine connect via SLIP or something like it, receive its mail, and when mail stops flowing, disconnect. As people have pointed out, this can be done with MX records and UUCP. Without UUCP this is a MAJOR pain, because you have to find some way to get the mail flowing from the mail host to the dialed in machine. The way I've seen this done in the past is with finger: when the remote machine is successfully dialed in, it fingers an account on the mailhost. This triggers the mailhost to open an SMTP connection with the dialied in machine, and the mail gets delivered. At the same time, the dialed in machine starts a sendmail queue run and forwards all of its mail to be delivered to the mailhost, where SMTP handles the rest. However, getting this to work with sendmail is problematic, because you don't want to proccess the entire sendmail queue; you only want to proccess a queue of messages for the dialed in machine. A way to handle this is with MMDF, which can create seperate queues for seperate machines, and proccess them only on command. This solution scales pretty well, because every dialup customer gets their own queue, and nobody needs to install UUCP (hard), just SLIP or PPP (easy). Just FYI. Lee Silverman lee@netspace.org http://www.netspace.org/users/lee/ Don't say it's impossible because no one's ever done it!