[plug] Small office email problems

[chris]

Just run sendmail or your favourite MTA as normal, then run fetchmail on
a cron job to grab your mail from the mailbox..

ie every 5 minutes..

/usr/bin/fetchmail -f ./fetchmailrc

then sendmail can handle the mail server for you.

Have no idea why the masquerading is timing out.. maybe the bigpond mail
servers are the problem, and it doesnt like maintaining a connection
with slow dialups? I have regular problems with their mail servers over
silly things like (connections timing out etc) and its probably
something lame like that .. I cant think of any reason why the default
masquerading functions would otherwise time-out regularly.

Chris Hoy Poy
RHCE

On Thu, 2002-05-16 at 19:58, Kevin Shackleton wrote:
> I have a problem with email provision for four users in a small office scenario.
> 
> Our dial-up network connection works relatively well (50 kbps) and we have had no
> problems with running a Windows machine dialing up and getting our email from
> Bigpond using Outlook 2k.
> 
> I have now set up a network with a Linux machine (RedHat 7.1) functioning as the
> PPP gateway.
> 
> Web access works fine using squid - no trouble getting 1 MB files out to networked
> clients.
> 
> I set up accessability to mail.bigpond.com by adding a MASQ rule to ipchains
> forwarding.  I have not set up an MTA.  The setup works for test files but appears
> to time out with typical (30 KB) emails, with all clients using Win98 and Outlook
> 2k.
> 
> There appears to be two approaches to get email to work - overcome the MASQ
> timeout issue (if that's really what the problem is) or set up sendmail to
> (hopefully) overcome timeout issues.
> 
> I've not set up sendmail before and could not find a recipe for a simple relaying
> configuration.
> 
> I'd be keen to liaise with someone with expertise in this area of configuration -
> either effective MASQ'ing or MTA'ing.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> K.
>