Newbie comments & queries
dman, Brenda, Karsten, & others, hi,
following quite heavy complaints about my long-running Subject
line I changed it but have lost all help in the process, so am
posting this again under the original offending subject line.
I have got so far and can get no further. I have installed mutt,
exim, fetchmail, wvdial (and also diald which I see running in
top) but no ways can I get an email in or out to my dial up ISP.
The comments follow on from dman's email.
EXIM
I ran eximconfig again, correctly, and am sure there is no problem
there.
> The "visible" mail name of your system should be the same as "echo
> $HOST". Don't worry about it too much, just don't pick the name
> of your ISP (or some other real server).
looking at set i have no $HOST so gave hephaestus which is the
machine name (I have $HOSTNAME which is perhaps what you meant?)
> When you get to the question
> Which machine will act as the smarthost and handle outgoing mail?
> this is where you enter in the name of your ISP's SMTP server.
> ("imail.imaginet.co.za" according to what you wrote farther down)
OK, in Windows Pegasus this is entered as both my SMTP and POP3
host so sounds OK
> What you did before was tell exim that "imaginet.co.za" was the
> name of your machine. Thus when you tried to send mail to
> "foo@..." it wanted to deliver it locally but couldn't find the
> user 'foo'.
Understood.
> Get exim to work, then mutt will work. mutt doesn't do SMTP
> because
I presume this will now be the case.
FETCHMAIL
> First you need to tell mutt which host. Edit ~/.muttrc for that.
> Instead I use fetchmail for retrieving the mail.
OK, then that will be good enough for me, fetchmail seems to be
the standard anyway. Having decided on fetchmail, no need to edit
.Muttrc, right?
I wrote the .fetchmailrc file. Then I wondered where to put it.
The /usr/share/doc/fetchmail/sample.rc file states
1. put in your home directory (ie. /home/ian) 2. permissions
should not be greater than -rw------- (0600)
this is what i have done, but as I wrote it from root, I have done
a chown to change it to my ownership as there was a complaint that
i did not own it.
Now, when I run fetchmail from user ian i get
POP# connection to imail.imaginet.co.za failed: temporary name
server error fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
mutt sill says "POP host is not defined" when I try and send the
mail.
> There is an internal arrangement, but it is not obvious just by
> seeing some program names.
OK, so in mutt I can send the mail, but how do I get it. Does
this automatically get done at the same time or do I have to run
fetchmail and dial in a second time to have this done? How, with
diald (or wvdial) + mutt + exim + fetchmail do I make the process
of sending and collecting mail from imaginet a simple one-time
operation?
With diald running something should fire this up automagically on
demand.
When i run wvdial it connects to my ISP and then seems to do the
right things, entering into ppp negotiation. Then that is as far
as it goes, it stays there hogging the screen. It ends up with...
PPP session from .......
--> PPP negotiation detected
--> Starting pppd at <the date>
and it stays there, so how do I enter into another program to send
or fetch mail. Cannot be right.
> Do you have a login on the server? My school runs Solaris, so I
> just log in to that machine and do all my mail there instead of on
> my debian box. If you use fetchmail, it won't give you the IMAP
> benefit of server-side folders. mutt has some support for IMAP,
> but I've never used it.
I am not sure that I understand you here. I log in from the
computer at home or I carry it home and then do it there. I am
going to use one dedicated address on the linux box to start off
with and get going with just personal email (family around the
globe).
cat news. She has settled in. My maid went to put the freshly-
ironed towels in the linen cupboard today. I had a frantic call
at the shop that the was "a snake hissing at her" and would I come
home and deal with it! Fortunately I quizzed her about the size
and colour of the snake, so she bravely went back --- and found
the cat!
Regards
Ian
Ian Balchin
Grahamstown, South Africa.
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