Re: fetchmail and mutt
-- Paul Scott <paslist@ultrasw.com> wrote
(on Thursday, 19 December 2002, 01:02 PM -0700):
> Matthew Weier O'Phinney wrote:
>
> >-- Paul Scott <paslist@ultrasw.com> wrote
> >(on Thursday, 19 December 2002, 10:26 AM -0700):
> >
> >>Jean-Marc V. Liotier wrote:
> >>
> >>>A quite "classical" config is to use fetchmail to bring your emails onto
> >>>your local mail engine, then use any MUA you please (mutt, pine are
> >>>happy to
> >>>use your favorite editor).
> >>>
> >>Can you be more specific about "local mail engine"?
> >>
> >>This is what I am trying to do even though I can't install mutt without
> >>exim. (Of course I don't have to use exim).
> >>
> >>
> >Huh. Last I checked I'm running mutt without exim -- I'm using postfix.
> >
> I was referring to installing. Mutt depends on exim or another one of a
> set of packages which provide the virtual package called
> mail-transfer-agent and so apt-get won't install mutt without one of
> those packages.
Right, I knew that. ;-) slipped my mind. Sorry if I sounded snippy
there.
> >What was meant by "local mail engine" is an MTA -- mail transfer agent.
> >Common ones are sendmail, qmail, postfix, and exim. Basically, fetchmail
> >needs to be able to deliver the mails once it fetches them, and it uses
> >the MTA on your machine to do so (you configure which one). *nix users
> >also commonly have procmail running, which takes the mails as they
> >arrive and filters them according to the 'recipes' the user writes. Such
> >filtering can include spam filtering, forwarding mail, and sorting mail
> >into mailboxes. Then you fire up your MUA, point it to the mail
> >repository, and read away.
> >
> Thanks for the clarification. I was planning to use procmail for my
> filtering. Now I realize I will also need something to send the mail
> that mutt composes.
Yep. Mutt doesn't do SMTP -- it relies on having an MTA on the machine.
There are patches for mutt that allow it, but they haven't been applied
to the debian packaged version (I'm not sure how stable they are, which
might account for their ommission).
Procmail recommends exim and/or a mail-transfer-agent package -- and I'm
not sure it can operate properly without one (I've never seen it
configured -- or configured it myself -- without having an MTA on the
system), so you should have what you need anyways if you install one.
If you choose exim, my understanding is that it can do a lot of the
filtering procmail is capable of already, so you may not need to install
procmail -- search through the list for information on this.
--
Matthew Weier O'Phinney
matthew@weierophinney.net
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