Re: UUCP-over-TCP Vs Fetchmail

[Sridhar Iyengar <iyengars@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

We've been using fetchmail to transfer all our mails from our US office & it's
been smooth sailing over dial-up as well as leased line. I plan to use the same
mail retrieval mechanism on our ISDN line too. The configuration is very easy
plus fetchmail gives u an option to set the timeout period to communicate with
ur server. This can be useful if u're dealing with an unreliable line which
disconnect fast. You can set a releastically higher timeout for fetchmail to do
the job. One major reason for me to select fetchmail was that we had to retrieve
mails from multiple domains in the US and redistribute it locally, resolve
mail-aliases, handle multidrop mail accounts, etc. This was achived very easily
using fetchmail + some sendmail ruleset tweaking. I use sendmail to redistribute
the fetched mails locally.

There're a whole lot of other features too (checkout "man fetchmail") I haven't
used UUCP, but I must admit that i'm pretty much happy with fetchmail.

-Sridhar

PS : Here's a quote from the uucp-1.06.1 online docs :
"Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find a more wretched
hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."
      ---DECWars


Oommen Thomas wrote:

> We have been using UUCP over TCP for email transfer between our Madras
> offices for quite sometime now without any problems.
>
> A few months back, when we opened an office at Pune, we had a similar
> setup between our Pune and US servers. But to our surprise, we find
> frequent timeout on a line which is very fast for FTP/HTTP - upto 41Kbps
> on an ISDN line, which is good enough.
>
> As per my understanding after going thru the discussons on the Net and the
> HOWTOs, UUCP over TCP uses the 't' protocol which does not have any
> error-correction or flow control and expects a 8bit clean line and hence
> is to  be used for reliable networks (like the Internet). So
> synchronisation fails and retries may not be working (or not even
> attempted at all).
>
> I know lot of people will say that UUCP is an outdated protocol, but pls
> note that it has been (and is still) in use by very large/critical mail
> servers around the world. But the problem is that it was not designed to
> be used over the Internet (TCP) and hence some finetuning is required?
>
> My main question is :-
> --------------------
> How is fetchmail when compared to this?
> Will it solve my problem and have the mails of local users collcetd from a
> remote server which supports POP and viceversa (over SMTP) with no
> timeouts?
>
> TIA
>
> Regards,                                              Imagine Technologies
> Oommen                                           16, Shaffee Mohammed Road
>                                                               Rutland Gate


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