Re: mail and mailer questions
I recently answered a similar question:
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On Tue, 17 Mar 1998 18:54:35 EST, Shaleh wrote:
> I am using a modem and ppp to login to my ISP. What is a good setup for
> e-mail??? Currently I use NS4's e-mail but it is a little buggy and
> crashes often. I would like to have a nice X front end. I currently
> recieve between 250 and 350 e-mails a day and am logged in via modem
> sporadically at best.
exmh is popular, I like it, it has never crashed on me, it has lots of
nice features, and it is packaged for both bo and hamm.
exmh home page
http://www.beedub.com/exmh/
exmh is a tcl/tk frontend to MH or nmh (so you'll need MH or nmh too),
and I'd recommend running procmail to sort your mail, and fetchmail to
get your mail, and smail to send mail, assuming dialup networking.
If this sounds a little more involved than configuring netscape, it is,
however I think you'll find the added functionality worthwhile in the
long run.
I configured fetchmail and promail mostly using the documentation
available in the package (man, info, /usr/doc/*), however some online
procmail resources were also helpful for fine tuning:
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~ian/procmail.html
http://www.ssc.com/lg/issue14/procmail.html
http://www.helsinki.fi/~reriksso/procmail/mini-faq.html
http://www.helsinki.fi/~reriksso/procmail/links.html
The primary obstacle to overcome with smail is rewriting headers and
making them stick during smtp posts. I like Daniel Martin's solution,
but there are both simpler and more complex methods:
http://www.math.jhu.edu/~martind/mybox.html
Coincidentally, I recommend you follow the recent advice regarding MH
configuration:
http://www.debian.org/Lists-Archives/debian-user-9803/msg01287.html
More good MH resources:
http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/mail/mh-faq/part1/f
aq.html
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~mh/book/
Exmh itself is pretty easy to configure, has a gui for most
configuration, help menu (in 2.x version) which includes faq and
mailing lists subscription.
-----------------8<----------------------
Additionally, you asked for was a text mode email client and mentioned
mailbox styles, and there are at least several of each.
Originally, my mail configuration was setup to work with mutt
(my preferred text-mode email client) and exmh (preferred X-windows),
however my mutt configuration is no longer. I believe my mutt was
disavowed sometime amidst my hamm upgrade due to a long outstanding
dependency. The original idea was that mutt and exmh both called on
smail's post command
Anyways, I just reinstalled mutt, and assigned my exmh inbox to be
used, sent and received mail, and looked at my headers, and the
Return-Path: field was correctly set, although the From: field
apparently needs to be configured a little better because I used the
example ~/.muttrc (properly modified) and html manual in /usr/doc,
however sending to my isp account I get:
From: unknown@u.washington.edu (kotsya: David Stern)
If anyone knows what causes this, please post list and/or me.
Anyways, Mutt has a very advanced feature list, and if you want pgp
integration, you'll have to get the non-us version from
nonus.debian.org (that's what someone said last night, I haven't tried
it).
The one thing mutt uses by default that I'm not comfortable with (yet)
is vi, but this can be configured to another editor (I chose pico) in
~/.muttrc or in the EDITOR environment variable. There was also an
interesting thread re: vi last night. I intend to learn vi, ultimately.
--
David Stern
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http://weber.u.washington.edu/~kotsya
kotsya@u.washington.edu
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