Please secure your FTP access

Polytropon freebsd at edvax.de
Sat Sep 17 07:16:21 UTC 2011


Even if this might get more off-topic now, allow me the
following idea:

On Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:05:38 -0400, Allen wrote:
> My message was sent with Thunderbird. I don't normally use that because
> it's a resource hog and a half, but since my ISP decided to be stupid
> and no longer allow direct access, instantly making Mutt and Fetchmail
> impossible to use anymore, I have to use something else. I miss Mutt and
> Fetchmail, but my ISP is acting stupid. So now, I use Thunderbird
> sometimes, Opera's Mail client a lot more, and Kamil, and others,
> whenever. Sylpheed and the other one related to it get some use from me,
> along with Opera and Kmail, as my main clients now. Still miss Mutt though.

According to what your ISP does wrong, and what your current
solution is (IMAP -or- POP+SMTP), there's a nice suggestion
if you want to handle your mail locally (use of program of
choice, getting messages from server and storing them on
_your_ machine):

You've mentioned fetchmail which does regular POP3 mail
incorporation and can also add many authentification features
an ISP might require. If this does _not_ work anymore for
you, does this mean your ISP blocks POP3, or your mail
provider doesn't offer that _essential_ feature anymore?

Depending on your local storing format (mbox, MH, MailDir),
you can use _any_ client that understands that format (i.
e. all clients use the _same_ local storage structure),
so it's easy to switch clients depending on requirements.

For _sending_ mail: If you run the system's sendmail mailer
subsystem properly, you could directly send messages by
locally enqueuing them. Many ISPs refuse to accept messages
from dynamic IP, as they are considered spam. So if your
ISP offers you to relay your mail through one of ITS
servers (with a _static_ IP), you can easily configure
a statement "define(`SMART_HOST', `mx.your-isp.foo')"
in your mc file.

In the end, you don't need to configure POP & SMTP in all
your different programs, but only as ~/.fetchmailrc for
fetchmail (for POP), and your sendmail as described above
(for SMTP). Your applications get messages from local spool
and send directly to local sendmail.

This allows you flexibility in case you cannot use IMAP
(or intendedly want to use a program that's not capable
of using IMAP). The solution described may be sufficient
if your system is the only (or at least primary) one you
deal with mail on.



PS. This message illustrates the proper use of top-posting.
    appending replies to quotes, and trimming. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...


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