Threading (was Apt Errors Question )

[Jack Bowling]

On Tue, Sep 04, 2007 at 06:36:35AM -0400, Hal Burgiss wrote:
> 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.
>

I bashed out the following script for watching my mail proceedings when
setting up my fetchmail/procmail/mutt setup last time:

$ cat /usr/local/bin/watch_mail.sh

#!/bin/bash
multitail -ci white -i /home/jb/fetchmail.log -ci yellow -i \
/var/log/mail.log -ci green /home/jb/procmail.log
  
Allows you to check out the flow of mail from pop server to your inbox.
Adjust colors to show up against your desktop background to taste.

Jack