On Sat, Oct 12, 2002 at 01:55:16PM +0530, Sandip P Deshmukh wrote:
most of biff, xbiff, etc programs point to /var/mail/sandip directory.
what is this? am i missing on some powerful feature of linux way of
handling mail? is there a more elegant way of handling e-mail than what
i used to do in windows?
Yes. Go check out fetchmail. Unix tends to prefer to handle mail on
it's own rather than letting the MUA attempt the task of mail fetcher
and SMTP client. Your mail handling options go up considerably when
you go along with this idea.
Just set up fetchmail, let it run in the background and forget you
have to download email.
/var/mail/sandip is your mail spool file. Probably not a good idea to
toy around with it by hand; let your MUA handle it. (While it's
possible and easy to read email by hand with a text editor, the vast
majority of users prefer to use an MUA to parse the file into
bite-sized pieces. 8:o)
lastly, is it possible for different users on my machine to send mails
to eachothers without running a mail-server?
No. Don't try to work your way around this, just install an MTA and
get it over with. Other people here can get you started on how to do
this, and how to make it aware of your ISP's outgoing mail server.