Thanks to Todd Slater & Brian McKee

[Tony Arnold]

On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 16:42 +0100, Gabriel M Dragffy wrote:
> On Sun, 2006-09-10 at 13:58 +1000, Ken McLennan wrote:
> > 	My mutt setup is working fine, but Postfix hates me. It's sending my
> > emails out, but they aren't arriving anywhere. Hence I'll continue with
> > Evolution until I get it sorted out. Either that, or I'll get so annoyed
> > with Postfix that I'll just keep using Evolution anyway =).
> 
> I'm sorry this reply is really quite off topic and I'm not sure weather
> to bother with a new thread. Anyway something is really annoying me, I
> seem to hear so much about Mutt and something like postfix, it seems to
> be very common. This craze is just passing me by. Please would someone
> kindly explain to me what mutt+postfix or + courier actually is (the
> synaptic descriptions didn't enlighten me much), and also why it is so
> good and popular. Maybe I can also use this??

OK. mutt is a mail client that runs in a terminal window. It's purely
terminal window based with no fancy GUI. If you've used vim, then the
interface will feel familiar. One reason mutt is so popular is that it
is highly configurable (there is a config file you have to edit
manually, but there are alot of options!) and it is also very fast and
deals with large mail boxes very efficiently.

postfix is a mail transport agent, that is it runs in the background and
looks after delivering any outgoing mail and will also deal with any
mail coming into your system and deliver it to you mailbox. Alternative
to postfix are sendmail, exim and others. postfix is the choice for
Ubuntu probably because it is reasonably straight forward to configure.

courier is an imap server. This would run on a machine where your mail
gets delivered and would allow you to get at that mail and all your
folders using an imap compatible client, such as mutt, thunderbird,
evolution etc.

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Tony.
-- 
Tony Arnold, IT Security Coordinator, University of Manchester,
IT Services Division, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL.
T: +44 (0)161 275 6093, F: +44 (0)870 136 1004, M: +44 (0)773 330 0039
E: tony.arnold at manchester.ac.uk, H: http://www.man.ac.uk/Tony.Arnold