Re: A few (stupid?) smail questions
[sorry for the length, but in writing this i realized that the info
might be useful to other people, so i'm sending to the list as well as
to johan.]
> I have succeeded in sending a test message to myself from Elm and by
> telnetting my ISP I could see that the message arrived.
good! that's half the battle!
> I have installed smail, elm end tkmail. What I want to know is how to get
> smail to read my incoming mail from the Internet Service Provider.
smail doesn't read email from your ISP; it's only for distributing
email from your users (ie, you) to other hosts, and *accepting*
incoming mail for you from other hosts on the net.
the latter might sound like what you need, but if you're connecting
via a standard dialup line to a provider who receives your mail for
you, what you really want is is a POP (Post Office Protocol) client.
this is a small program, run either interactively (via the shell) or
automatically (via `cron') that gets any waiting email for you from
your ISP's mail host.
if you were connected full-time to the net (if your modem is connected
to your ISP 24 hours a day, or you have some higher speed connection
like frame relay, T1, etc.) and wanted to receive email directly to
your computer rather than going through the mail host at your ISP,
then it makes sense to run your own mail server (see below for more
details). but you probably don't need to do that.
there's a POP client in the debian distribution called (guess!)
`popclient'. popclient will make a connection to the host where your
mail is stored, transfer the messages to your computer, and then
remove them from the mail host storage.
i found the most recent version of popclient in the debian
distribution as:
unstable/binary-i386/mail/popclient_3.05-3.deb
(unfortunately, the setup of popclient has changed over the last
several versions, and it's sometimes hard to keep up with how it
works. i'll document what i've gotten to work with the above
version.)
first, create a file called `.poprc' in your home directory, which
contains a line like this:
server HOST username USER password PASSWORD protocol pop3 fetchall
replace `HOST' with the name of your mail host, `USER' with your
username on that host, and `PASSWORD' with your password of your mail
account on that host. (don't put the first spaces in (before
`server'); that's just indentation for the clarity of this message.)
for security reasons, popclient won't run unless the permissions of
the file allows only the owner (you) to read and write the file (this
is so no one can see your password). to set the file permissions,
type (assuming you're in your home directory):
% chmod 0600 .poprc
then, when you want to check your email, do:
% popclient
then:
% elm
> What is smtp?
`smtp' stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (not
send-mail-transport protocol, as someone else said). it's a widely
used standard for sending email messages from one computer to another.
(if you're interested in the nitty-gritty, you can read the technical
specification of the protocol in RFC822, available at:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc822.html)
normally, you shouldn't need to worry about smtp -- it runs behind the
scenes. if you use elm to compose and send a message, elm asks smail
to deliver the message. smail makes a connection to either your mail
host or the host of the recipient of the message (depending on how
smail is configured), and transfers the message. for most people who
get their net connections via a standard dialup, smtp is used *only*
for outgoing email, and a POP client is used for incoming email.
if you *are* connected fulltime, *and* your computer has a domain name
(not just your mail host, but your actual machine), other mailers on
other machines can send mail directly to your machine by making a
connection to your smtp server (`smtpd'; `d' is for daemon, basically
meaning a system process rather than a user process), and deliver the
messages that way.
> Some of the smail-documentation told me to put a line in
> inetd.conf to invoke smptd, but I could not find a file with that name on my
> computer.
>
> There was also a suggestion that I could put "sendmail -bs" in the file
> /etc/rc. I could not find such a file either.
you shouldn't need to do either of these. i'm not certain, but i
believe both of these things are trying to do the same thing:
configure your computer so it is always running an smtp server.
> Do I need biff if I have a dialup ppp connection?
all biff does is alert you when you have new mail *on your local
system*; it doesn't know that new mail arrived on your mail host, and
it doesn't care how the mail got to your local machine.
if you're running popclient by hand (eg, from the shell), you probably
don't need to use biff. but if you run it some other way (via
`cron'), biff can be nice because it tells you in some detail (by
showing the message headers) when new mail has arrived. and if you
*are* connected fulltime and are running a mail server (smtpd), biff
can also be helpful.
> I tried to use rmail, but do not know which address to use in the command
> line. If I use my own email-address, nothing happens. When I press Ctrl-C I
> get the message that some process was interrupted and the mail deleted.
> Which mail?
you don't want to be running `rmail' yourself -- that's something that
elm should be running for you (if it's run at all; it's mostly a
holdover from the old days when email was sent via UUCP rather than
over TCP/IP networks). you should stick to elm, or pine, or whatever
it is that you use as a mail client.
hope this helps.
john
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