Threading (was Apt Errors Question )

[Hal Burgiss]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 03:13:44AM -0500, Leonard Chatagnier wrote:
> >
> Thanks Hal, just learned a little bit more.  So now I need to look at 
> sendmail, fetchmail, postfix.  Think they're installed so will take a 
> look a conf files.  Hope they are all not as hard as postfix.  Would be 
> nice if they all came configured except for adding you email accounts.
> Your info will get working on what I should be doing. Thanks a bunch,

Just to clarify one thing: there is a package named sendmail, which is
a smtp server. It has a command 'sendmail' as part of that pagckage.
But some competing smtp servers, like postfix, have a command called
sendmail as well. So if you have postfix, you should have a sendmail
command, which should suffice.

I have in ~/.muttrc:

 set sendmail="/usr/sbin/sendmail -oi -oem"

That sendmail command will be how mutt knows to handle outbound mail.

I have several pop mail accounts. My ~/.fetchmailrc (where you
configure $USER accounts), has one entry like:

 poll pop.iglou.com proto pop3 user hal9 is halb here password ******* fetchall nokeep

That is the one for my ISP. You need one line like that for each pop
account (or imap, whatever). This is basically giving the mail server
name, protocol, telling it my local $USER account and my remote $USER
accounts with password info, and not to keep mail on the server, but
to bring it all to me. fetchmail can run as a standalone daemon, from
cron periodically, or from the command line. I don't think mutt can
run it (but maybe it can???). Like all Unix utilities there is a
zillion variations on this, including various ways to do more secure
fetching if your remote server supports it. But above is just simple,
basic fetchmail config.

For testing, run fetchmail from the command line so you can see if
there are errors. If you don't get mail when you think you should,
also check the mail server logs since fetchmail will typically hand
off mail to postfix, which then will handle the local mailbox delivery
stuff.

-- 
Hal