Mail Server (progress)

[Derek Broughton]

David McGlone wrote:
> 
> Wow, this is getting to be crazy. A simple task turns into a nightmare
> almost.
> 
I'm afraid I have to lay the blame, at least somewhat, on the developers.  I
hung out on the exim developers list for a year or two, and there are
people (not the primary developer thankfully) who firmly believe that it is
_wrong_ to make a mail server simple to configure, because they think
idiots will then become mail admins, and bugger up the whole international
email system.  They're missing two important details - idiots already _are_
mail admins, and need some tools that can make sure they don't misconfigure
mail servers; and the whole international email system is clearly
pretty-well buggered anyway!

> Ok so far, I *think* I have fetchmail working, it seems to be retrieving
> my mail, but heck I can't find the mail anywhere. When I look in /var/mail
> it says there are messages for dmcglone but when I try to read them they
> disappear like Chris Angel :-)

What precisely do you have in /var/mail?  Under no circumstances should you
be using mbox files - there's simply no good reason to use them these days
for anything but an archive.  Set up delivery to Maildir directories.  Then
under /var/mail/dmcglone (or whatever) you should see "new", "cur"
and "tmp" directories.  In the "new" one, there'll be one file per
message - until you look at them in a mail program, when they'll get moved
to "cur"

> Here is what I'm getting when I fetchmail:

> reading message d.mcglone at att.net@pop-sbc.mail.yahoo4.akadns.net:1 of 1
> (1754 octets)
> #*** not flushed

Glad to see that :-)  The number of times I've modified my mail config
without preventing the messages being deleted from the server...

> after I checked mail, I looked in mailbox and indeed there was 1 message,

How?

> when I chose to read it, viola it did an amazing disappear act and said
> there was no mail in inbox.
-- 
derek