[CentOS] Story of an email

Scott Robbins scottro at nyc.rr.com
Fri Nov 29 13:55:55 UTC 2013


On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 01:23:52PM +0000, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> Patrick Lists wrote:
> 
> > On 11/28/2013 10:34 PM, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >> I'm running postfix + dovecot on my CentOS server,
> >> together with amavisd, clamd and spamassassin,
> >> following the instructions in
> >> <http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/postfix>.
> >> As far as I can see it is all working,
> >> but I must admit I'm not clear exactly what path
> >> an incoming email travels along.
> >> 

> > http://www.postfix.org/OVERVIEW.html
> 
> I'm afraid this document only tells me about one small step on the journey.
> It doesn't mention amavis, fetchmail or dovecot.
> I run fetchmail (through cron.d) to collect email 
> from various email servers.


> So the first step, I guess, is that fetchmail passes the email
> through port 25 to the postfix sendmail emulator?

If you completed the steps in that article, then fetchmail would be
grabbing the mail from the Dovecot server. 

Really short version.

Mail sent to your machine, on port 25, would go to postfix, which would
then do something with it.

Where is fetchmail pulling?  From your Dovecot server?  
If so, then mail comes in, goes to postfix, which sends it to Dovecot,
where you then get it from fetchmail.

Slightly longer version.


Mail on port 25 comes into your server, e.g., postfix, which would then,
again, assuming you made a setup like Ned's article, give it to Dovecot. 

As an example, my even simpler setup has mail coming into my postfix
server, which I then set up to pass along to maildrop to filter and deliver
the mail.  For a pop account from my ISP, for example, the roadrunner.com
that I use on this list, I have getmail (same idea as fetchmail) pull it,
and it makes no use of my postfix server.  

If fetchmail is pulling from your ISP, or gmail, then that wouldn't be
working with postfix, it would be something between you and gmail or ISP.

I haven't followed the thread, so am not entirely sure I've answered your
question.  

-- 
Scott Robbins
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