Re: understanding mail
*-"tracheotomy_bob" <tracheotomy_bob@iname.com>
|
| Hallo everyone,
| I'm not certain I've got a grasp of mail yet, so I could use your help. Currentli I've got smail, fetchmail, tkmail, xlbiff and exmh installed. I don't know if I need all these. From what I understand of smail this is just used for local mail transport, uucp and smtp. Now if I'm not connected to a network then I don't need uucp or smtp. However I do connect to a pop3 server via TCP/IP (hence fetchmail.) Now I've got smail configured for local use (no smtp or uucp) and fetchmail happily fetches mail from the pop3 server. Happily this can be read in tkmail.
I don't think you need exmh. (n)mh can be useful, though.
| However, the smail documentation doesn't appear to mention pop3 mail, and the fetchmail documentation doesn't appear to deal with sending mail. So when I try to reply to any message that has arrived via fetchmail, obviously, it cannot be delivered. So what do I configure to send mail outside the local machine via pop3?
Fetchmail is only used to get mail, it has no sending capability by
itself. What happens when you use fetchmail is that it gets the mails
from your pop-server and then resends them with the help of your
local MTA (smail).
To send mail to the outside, you must configure smail. What you need is
probably not pop. You should set up smail to use a smarthost. This way
you can send mail normally, and have smail queue them up and wait with
the actual delivery. Then, when you connect to the net, you flush the
queue and smail will forward all non-local messages to the smarthost.
The smarthost will then process the mails as usual and send them on
their way. (I use exim instead of smail, so I don't know exactly
how you'd do it)
| I stuck the line "biff y" in my .bashrc (I think I read somewhere that this notifies you when it receives mail, but it appears that it only notifies you after you issue a shell command. No command, no messages), and as xlbiff appears to be the X version I assume that this goes in .xinitrc. However if I send myself messages xlbiff doesn't display any mailboxes or such, instead I get a prompt that reads "sh: scan command not found". Now, scan appears to be in /etc/mh, installed as part of exmh. Which to my mind means that I haven't done something with exmh that I should have. But what?
scan should be in (n)mh. You could also try the regular biff. There
are many other programs to notify you about new mail. The shell is
usually a bad candidate if you run X. If you still want to use it,
look for MAIL, MAILPATH and MAILCHECK in bash's manpage.
| Any help configuring mail is appreciated, but especially help in understand how everything fits together.
| bye for now...
I hope I covered some of your questions.
Try to keep your lines below seventy characters. Otherwise they
break my quoting :-(
--
A mathematician is a machine for converting coffee to theorems
(Martin Schulze)
olet@ifi.uio.no [-: .elOle. :-] olet@debian.org
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