Re: E-mail for dummies - part 2
On Mon, 5 Jul 1999, Hans van den Boogert wrote:
> qmail and fetchmail are MTAs (Mail Transfer Agents), right?
>
> fetchmail downloads messages from a pop3/imap server and puts them into the
> local mail delivery system. (Besides, where do the messages end up and in
> what form?)
Correct so far.
> Then exim (Mail Delivery Agents) delivers the mail to local users (I
> presume in /home/username) after which the MUA (Mail User Agents, like
> XFMail or some other marvel).
>
> So what about sending mail then? Using 'smail' sounds obvious, but how does
> the route from MUA to the SMTP server go.
qmail, smail, sendmail and exim are *all* MTAs. So is fetchmail, but a
special one (it just does POP, APOP, etc. stuff).
procmail and deliver are MDAs. Note that the only one of the general MTAs
above that needs a MDA is sendmail. The others do local delivery on their
own. Confused yet?
To send mail from a dialup connection, you need to get your MTA to tell a
few white lies. Have a look at the ISP HOWTO which explains how to do
this with Sendmail. I've never used Exim, so I can't give any advice
there.
With sendmail, you can also rewrite outgoing addresses, so instead of
sending as "you@yourlinuxbox", mail would appear to come from
"userid@realisp.com". Look at the sendmail address rewrite mini-HOWTO.
Again, Exim might do this too, but I don't know.
> I've installed fetchmail and exim, but haven't had time to read the man
> pages. Does anybody have a good way to convert man pages into readable
> ASCII text, so I can print them out and read them off-line? (The purchasing
> of a notebook is still in the pipeline, so printing will have to do for now
> :-)
You could try the dwww package that makes man pages into web pages--you
could print those.
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