Setting up Mail Services, Linux, Emacs, and ppp.

[alan davis <adavis@saipan.com>]

 [I am sorry.  I hit the wrong keys and sent this message before I
 completed it.  I will try again.]

  (25 September 1996, 8:36 PM, waiting for Supertyphoon Yates which is
    quite nearby).


    I am able to send mail to distant sites fine, but mail to
    addresses at the domain of my ISP usually fails, from within Emacs
    (but seems to work from within Pine, at least some of the time).
    Actually, mail sometimes gets out from emacs to local addresses
    too.  Invariably, when sending mail to the same domain, I receive
    a message from the "mailer-daemon" that the recipient cannot be
    located; even so, _some_ of these messages are received by the
    recipients, and I haven't successfully separated out the variables
    that are responsible.  

    I note that in Pine there is a setup variable for the SMTP server,
    while, in Emacs, I cannot find one.  Pine seems to send mail
    directly to the smtp server, while with Emacs mail is queued and
    sent out when the ppp connection is made, using, in this case,
    sendmail.  

    The following facts may be of note:

	1.  As a matter of configuration for a ppp link, my machine
    shows the same name in /etc/hosts as the Domain name of my ISP,
    and thus of the addresses of any mail addresses local to the same
    ISP.  I suspect that the failure messages from "mailer-daemon"
    indicate that my system thinks it is the machine upon which these
    recipients should be found.  Note that even for local mail that
    Pine successfully mails, I recieve these failure messages.
 
	2.  I am using smail, though I am not sure why, or whether it
    is best.  I would like to know whether I can configure the SMTP
    server name (which is not identical to the ISP domain name, but a
    machine on the same domain) in smail.  Smail is queueing messages
    nicely for outgoing mail, and I hope I can keep this feature.

	3.  I cannot find a variable in emacs in which to specify the
    name of the mail server (smtp server).  

	4.  I set SMTP=<mail server name> in the system environment,
    but this maybe didn't make any difference, unless it made it
    worse.  

	5.  I am using vm in emacs.

	I am perplexed, and would very much appreciate help getting to
    where I can use mail in emacs with confidence.  Heck, GNUS asked
    for the name of the nntp server and seems to work as promised.  



-- 
    Alan Eugene Davis       Marianas High School 
    adavis@saipan.com	    AAA 196 Box 10,001                       
			    Saipan, MP  96950                        
			    Northern Mariana Islands                 
    
	15o 8.8'N  145o 42.5'E                          GMT+10


``There is no evidence that an octopus can respond to sound, but the
    frequencies tried have been limited.''
``Octopuses respond to such stimuli as shaking the tank, but the
    receptors responsible are probably not confined to the statocysts
    since the reaction continues after their removal''
                                   ---J. Z. Young

	     1997---International Year of the Coral Reef