Re: Setting Up Email

[Anita Lewis <ajlewis2@intac.com>]

On Fri, 12 Dec 2003 18:51:04 -0800, Scarletdown wrote:
> I've been trying to set up POP3 email access (in text mode instead of from the desktop), and 
> am really stumped now.  I just did a little experiment and installed fetchmail, then from the 
> command prompt gave the fetchmail command as follows:
>
> fetchmail -p AUTO -u gsutton9503 mail.charter.net
>
> I was then asked for my password for the server.  After entering the password, apparently a 
> bunch of messages downloaded to somewhere on my hard drive and were deleted off of the 
> server.  Where did the messages get saved to, and how do I access them?  I tried running 
> mutt, but at the bottom of the screen is the notice:
>
> /var/mail/scarletdown: No such file or directory (errno = 2) (scarletdown is the name of the 
> regular non-root user account).
>
> I did a little investigating and it seems that there should be a file (or possibly a directory) in 
> each user's home directory called mbox.  Well, there isn't, and I am not sure where else to 
> look for mbox.
>
> So since mutt doesn't work, how do I access those 19 messages that were downloaded?
>
>

I'm not sure on this, but I think your mail is going to be in
/var/mail/gsutton9503.  It didn't go into scarletdown, because you didn't
tell it to.  You should make a .fetchmailrc file for your home directory and
include 

is "scarletdown" here

and like someone else said, use 'keep' in it until you get it working
correctly.

For you it would be this:

poll mail.charter.net proto pop3 
   user "gsutton9503" is "scarletdown" here keep

You can also include: with pass "secret-password" 
That goes after the user section on mine - not sure if it has to be there. 
You need to make .fetchmailrc rw for only the owner so that no one outside
can see your password.

chmod 600 .fetcmailrc

As for getting your mail, if you find that file in /var/mail, first make
sure that you do not have scarletdown there.  If you have root privilege on
the machine, then you can change the name with 'mv' and change the owner. 
It should already be group 'mail' and have rw for both owner and group, I
think.  So you could just do:

mv gsutton9503 scarletdown
chown scarletdown scarletdown

Then mutt should go right to it and any future mail should be added on to
that file.

Anita