[lug] MTAs MUAs and DNS, oh my!

[Chris Riddoch]

I've been fiddling with a freshly frozen debian installation and have 
a question about the mail system logistics that isn't distribution spe
cific and honestly is making me feel like a complete idiot.

Here's what I think I know, and tell me if I screw up:

Most MUAs (except the most user-friendly/less functional) seem to pref
er sending mail a local MTA rather than a remote server. (Mutt's FAQ c
learly states that it's not an MTA)

Most MTAs seem to like having a fully-qualified domain name to use. Se
ndmail, qmail, exim, and smail complain and refuse to send mail along 
unless they can resolve the DNS of their host.

Fetchmail slurps mail from another server to the local system, but it 
works with the local MTA to send messages  into the user's local mail 
spool. (I mention this because the last time I asked someone about my 
setup they wanted to know why I felt I needed a local MTA at all)  Bes
ides, I want to be able to compose and read mail offline - it's easier
 to have it end up on localhost anyway, via fetchmail.

This certainly suggests the need for anyone on dialup, without a DNS e
ntry for their host, using a program like fetchmail, to have an MTA in
 the system for being able to recieve and send email.

Yet if the user wants to send mail, and the host has no DNS entry, and
 the mail client is not an MTA (mutt), and the ISP's mail server compl
ains when it is asked to send along mail because the mail client is gi
ving the info from its own system instead of the ISP's info, (username
@localhost isn't a what I want in my From: field, of course)...

What am I supposed to tell mutt/gnus/miscellaneous perl/python scripts
 to do, when they send mail? How do *you* set up a dialup system for h
andling email?

Qmail has a couple of promisinq-looking environment variables: MAILHOS
T, MAILUSER, and QMAIL-INJECT, but it keeps deferring the delivery of 
messages with CNAME_lookup_failed_temporarily._ (#4.4.3)  I used confi
g-fast to tell it to use the hostname of the machine, magrathea.  Afte
r all, MAILHOST should override this appropriately, right? Addressed i
n Qmail FAQ 2.5, this looks suspiciously similar to sendmail's error m
essage: Unable to qualify my own domain name, Unqualified host name ..
. unknown; sleeping for retry.

In mutt's FAQ, set hostname"..." or similar settings haven't done me m
uch good. I thought of using something like nullmailer, but it wouldn'
t be able to handle local delivery via fetchmail or a script sending o
nly within the system.

What's the best solution? I'm tired of carrying advertisements when I 
use my ISP's (cough) broken, out-of-date and non-Y2K-compliant web-mai
l interface and would like to have functioning mail systems on my desk
top and laptop.

Thanks for any help you can offer.
---
Chris Riddoch
socket at peakpeak.com
Via Palmpilot for the time being...