On my mail server (which runs an exim4 smarthost) my /etc/aliases resembles: # /etc/aliases mailer-daemon: postmaster postmaster: root nobody: root .. root: mgalea <---- Note My /etc/mailname holds "galeahome.ca" Any root bound mail on that machine is forwarded to mgalea@galeahome.ca by exim. Thunderbird on my personal machine collects the mail from the mail server. A thunderbird message filter "From Contains root@galeahome.ca" matches the email and steers it to a mail subfolder entitled "root". I get lots of mail from the UPS about power failures. I can also send mail from various machines crontabs, e.g. every month a crontab entry: 0 0 1 * * root COLUMNS=160 dpkg -l | mail -s "dpkg revisions" mgalea@galeahome.ca will forward the current state of my dpkg revs on that machine, and goes to the same thunderbird dir on my personal machine. Does that work? On 2023-12-22 14:44, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
I figure this is probably a solved problem, but it's one I've never looked at. And I admit to doing no research yet: I thought pointers from this group would be the place to start.
I find I have a lot of mail generated by cron and the like on several local machines, and I'd like to A) centralize that mail on a local server, and B) be able to view that with Thunderbird. Platform is Debian. It's not my intention to handle my Gmail or anything like that: this is meant exclusively for handling mail from local computers. Which would also mean the ability to send mail isn't important.
Currently if I want to look at local administrative mail, I have to use the nasty `mail` command from the "bsd-mailx" package. (Yes, I could install mutt - I don't like it much better. I'm well aware it's much more powerful.) But do I remember to look at these emails? No. If instead each host forwarded these mails to a single host, and I pointed Thunderbird at that ... I'd have some hope of managing this problem better.
"exim4" is usually (not always) installed on Debian systems. It claims to be an MTA: my knowledge of mail is so bad I don't even know if that means it just "pulls" or is also capable of forwarding local mail to another machine? And what would be the recommended server software?
Another possible solution would be to send the mail directly to a folder on the host that has Thunderbird without using a server? With the snag that the host in question isn't always on, and I wouldn't want it to run mail server software. Is that possible?
Yes, I know this is probably bigger than I think. I'd still like to start poking around and finding out about it. Suggestions welcomed, thanks.
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
-- Michael Galea