[plug] Sendmail, etc

[John Darrington]

> 
> Not so! Since the main mail handling software for the entire Internet is
> sendmail, that's *extremely* unlikely. In fact, in the UK the entire
> Linux/UNIX community uses Sendmail to get email from ISPs - anything else
> is a rarity. The insistance of Fetchmail over here is something that I
> still find bizarre.
Well if you can tell me *how* to make sendmail work in reverse, I'll be extremely
interested.  If it can be done, then I too would certainly dispense with fetchmail.
But as at version 8, sendmail *only* speaks SMTP or ESMTP.  afaik, these protocols
can only transfer mail in the direction  from the initiating process, to the listening
process.  Therefore, unless your ISP knows your IP address (hence it must be static),
then I can't see *how* sendmail can fetchmail.


> > The only way sendmail could be used to retrieve mail, is if you had your
> > own domain name assigned, and asked your ISP to forward mail to you,
> through
> > their mail exchanger.
> 
> Not so either.

If somehow, the ISP's sendmail did send a subscriber's mail to the dialin's
sendmail, then it would be tough if that subscriber wanted to login to the ISP machine
and look at his mail there?

I am very interested to know how this bidirectional version of sendmail works.  Can 
you post some details.

John