dovecot - Jan 2011 - How do folk . . . Aggregate system mail from LAN machines?

List, good evening,

Running Dovecot for external email, but not yet worked out how (best) 
to aggregate 'system' mail from other machines on the LAN.  By system 
mail, I mean mails generated by the OS or by applications, and 
addressed to root, or 'some admin user', etc.  Ideally, these would be 
seen by 'root' or 'some admin user' or whoever on our existing 
Dovecot/IMAP system.  Our scale is not large, we only have 5 servers 
on the LAN doing various things.

I wondered how other Dovecot users do this.  I've thought of 3 
possibilities:

1.  Install Dovecot on each LAN machine, and use Fetchmail to retrieve 
the messages using POP so that local mail stores were emptied.

2.  Perhaps, use a 'forwarding' mechanism of some sort on each LAN 
machine, but that would require an MTA on each LAN machine, would it not?

3.  I wondered whether /etc/alias, mentioned in a recent post by 
Simone Caruso, might help though again, presumably, requiring an MTA 
on each LAN machine.

What do you do?

regards, Ron

i use the standard sendmail everywhere, which uses central databases to
route mail to final delivery machines, after all filtering is done, it's
handed off to procmail for user side filtering and mailbox delivery. 
the concept of an MTA is after all, a mail transport agent :)

-david

On 01/12/2011 02:02 PM, Ron Leach wrote:
> List, good evening,
>
> Running Dovecot for external email, but not yet worked out how (best)
> to aggregate 'system' mail from other machines on the LAN.  By
system
> mail, I mean mails generated by the OS or by applications, and
> addressed to root, or 'some admin user', etc.  Ideally, these would
be
> seen by 'root' or 'some admin user' or whoever on our
existing
> Dovecot/IMAP system.  Our scale is not large, we only have 5 servers
> on the LAN doing various things.
>
> I wondered how other Dovecot users do this.  I've thought of 3
> possibilities:
>
> 1.  Install Dovecot on each LAN machine, and use Fetchmail to retrieve
> the messages using POP so that local mail stores were emptied.
>
> 2.  Perhaps, use a 'forwarding' mechanism of some sort on each LAN
> machine, but that would require an MTA on each LAN machine, would it not?
>
> 3.  I wondered whether /etc/alias, mentioned in a recent post by
> Simone Caruso, might help though again, presumably, requiring an MTA
> on each LAN machine.
>
> What do you do?
>
> regards, Ron
>

> 2.  Perhaps, use a 'forwarding' mechanism of some sort on each LAN
> machine, but that would require an MTA on each LAN machine, would it not?
I do something similar: On a set of (virtual) servers, I run a
super-lightweight MTA called "nullmailer". That just queues mails and
sends them over to the single server that runs a real MTA (which has
some rules to forward those mails to the right people).

Perhaps something like this works for you as well?

Gr.

Matthijs
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