fingerServer Suite.

Why I Wrote It

Basically because I didn't want to buy notifymail. EIMS can be configured to send a message via the finger port to a specified IP address if it receives mail for a given account. I want to send email to Frontier and have it pick the mail up as it is received, rather than polling for it..

What It Does

Installs a inetd daemon on port 79. Whenever the daemon receives a message it takes the first word of the message and looks for a script of that name within user.fingerserver.callbacks. The script, if it exists, is called with a string parameter which is the text of the message. It may return a string which is returned to the sender - assuming the port is still open.

Things To Watch Out For

I wanted to make Frontier pick up emails as they arrived at EIMS. EIMS supports a application called NotifyMail. I've reverse engineered that package because I suspected it was a very simple mechanism and I was right. EIMS simply sends a text message saying "nm_notifyuser" to the IP address specified for the account on port 79 - the finger port.

So, I wrote a finger server in Frontier. Here's how it is meant to work. Create new user in EIMS - say Frontier. It should be a normal; have a password, be login enabled, require APOP and have mail action of notifymail to. Fill the address to the IP address of the Frontier machine which can be the same as the EIMs host or not.

Now in Frontier bring up the fingerserver suite menu. Set the notifymail email address and password to match the EIMs settings. Choose Process NMNotify. Start the server with start server.

Now in EIMS choose an account that Frontier knows how to handle. Take weblogstats. Make its mail action forward to the email address Frontier.

Now when mail arrives for weblogstats it gets forwarded to the Frontier account. EIMS notifies Frontier, which checks the mailbox and finds mail originally sent to weblogstats. It knows about weblogstats, so it saves to a file in the appropriate place and calls the weblogStats.offsite.receiveReports script.

As long as Frontier knows what to do with destination, you can forward as many email addresses to the one email address as you wish.