Hi,

I originally tried to post this from ISP news server but it is being
unreliable, so
apologies if it turns up multiple times.

> On my current setup, it doesn't bypass sendmail as such - I was thinking
> of using getmail to move incoming mail from /var/mail to ~/Maildir. My
> only slight reservation about this is that it would have to be a
> frequent cron job for each user... unless I'm missing something - again
> .

Ugh, no. You really have two choices as I see it (and I get a chance
to
plug fdm ;-):

- Use getmail, fetchmail+procmail/maildrop, or fdm to grab the mail
with
POP3 and put it directly in maildirs. This takes sendmail entirely out
of
the equation for remote mail. I might avoid fdm for this purpose; I
don't
currently have a multidrop mailbox so fdm's support for them is
somewhat
creative and untested, unless you fancy being a tester ;-). Although
to my
knowledge the others don't privsep so you get to run a lot of
fetchmail or
Python mail handling code as root.

For local mail, you will also need to tweak sendmail to run an MDA
that can
deliver to maildirs (procmail, maildrop, fdm or whatever). AFAIK this
isn't
terribly hard.

- Use fetchmail, fdm, getmail or whatever to grab the mail and deliver
directly to sendmail (either by TCP or using a pipe, former probably
better
depending on your volume of mail) (this is what fetchmail does by
default)
and just change sendmail to invoke a different MDA. This has the
advantage
that nothing except sendmail must run as root (although I think you
will
need to explicitly configure/force fetchmail and getmail not to), also
that
all mail is treated the same, local and remote.

Hope this is useful,

-- Nicholas.