Date: Tue, 4 Aug 1998 22:45:45 -0500 (CDT) From: Jerry Dunham <jdunham@freeside.fc.net> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Need help for script to prod ISP's sendmail Message-ID: <199808050345.WAA07465@freeside.fc.net>
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This isn't really a FreeBSD question, but I don't know of another place to
ask it or a good place to look it up. If you know of one, feel free to
point me in the right direction.
I connect to my ISP via PPP over an ordinary modem. With the exception
of mail from mailing lists, my mail comes to my home machine (rider) at
dunham.org. Since my ISP as a matter of policy will not call rider, my
mail sticks in their sendmail queue until the next time I establish
contact, and then only comes across if I have the link up when their
sendmail queue happens to run (every half hour). This means that those
who send me mail often get back an error message that tells them sendmail
has been unable to deliver for 4 hours. The mail still gets through when
next I make contact, but these error message make many people think their
mail isn't getting through, and eliminates my ability to use my own
address for mailing lists (which usually choke on the error messages).
I know very little about programming, but can manage extremely simple
scripts. What I'd like to do is write something that would do:
telnet myisp.net 25
wait for my ISP to respond, then tell it:
etrn rider.dunham.org
etrn dunham.org
quit
This could be run once every three hours, eliminating the dreaded sendmail
complaint. What I don't know how to do is the "wait for my ISP to
respond" part. This would seem to be rather like the chat script PPP uses
to log me in, but I don't understand how that works.
Any useful suggestions will be appreciated.
--
Jerry Dunham FreeBSD Atarian ordinaire
jerry@dunham.org (512)335-0674 (H)
jdunham@awesome-f0.us.dell.com (512)728-4026 (O)
E Pluribus Unix
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