Re: Mail Setup

["Roger Scudder" <rscudder@usa.net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Juergen Fiedler <juergen@quotus.com>
Date: Sunday, January 24, 1999 12:17 AM


>Another one of those typical newbie questions...  I have been using
>Netscape Communicator for my mail and news up till now, but recently it
>seems less and less stable and besides, I wanted to learn how to do
>"real" mail anyway.  So the question is;
>
>Where do I start?
>
>The mail HOWTO seems to indicate that I should pick anything but
>sendmail.  But, then again, I figure, that sendmail is, at least, a
>known quantity.  The documentation for other mail daemons seems to be
>incomplete, at best. I tried to configure qmail, but I couldn't even
>figure out which domain name to give to configure-fast.  I have my own
>bogus domain and have to retrieve the mail from an external server.
>
>If anyone could give me some pointers about where to start I would be
>very grateful.


If you simply want to retreive mail from a POP3 server and send to a SMTP
server (common for ppp accounts), you probably don't even need to worry
about a mail program like sendmail or smail.  Your distribution will most
likely
have that ready and running for you.  It would have helped if you had told
us which distribution you are using.

I'll share a bit about how my RedHat system is doing mail.  The sendmail
daemon is started at boot time.  This is out of the box configuration... I
have recompiled the kernel several times and just make sure support for
send mail is included.

To get my mail from the POP3 server I use Eric's fetchmail which, once you
understand it, works very well.  fetchmail is included with RedHat.  Of
course
there are a dozen other similar programs... fetchmail has worked for me.

For reading and writing I like pine...  this is like choosing a text
editor...
people hold very strong beliefs about which is the best mail reader.  Even
though pine does news, I like slrn for news.  You should look at a few
programs including elm, mutt, and pine, and see which ones fit best.

If you are moving from a windose system and you are used to stuff like
eudora
the first thing you will miss is the filters.  All your mail will be in one
file... a bit
unpleasent if you belong to any lists.  This where procmail steps in.
procmail
is many times more powerful than any filters I have seen for windose mail
progs.
The man pages for procmail are very good... they will help you more than I
ever could.  There are three...  start with 'man procmail' for the overview.
'man procmailex' will give you a bunch of examples you can modify and use.

Besides a couple of shell scripts, that's my setup in a nutshell.   You are
welcome
to copies of my rc files and shell scripts   Just drop me an email if you'd
like to
take a look.

Unfortunate for me, I am writing this in windose...  yuck..  I need a
shower.

Enjoy Linux,
Roger



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