[plug] Sendmail, etc

John Darrington j.darrington at student.murdoch.edu.au
Sun Jul 19 21:28:50 WST 1998


> 
> I'm curious, what do people with dialup connections to an ISP use to
> retrieve their mail from the server?  I'm investigating sendmail atm,
> but it seems rather complicated (well the book is over 700 pages long),
> beside using Nertscape mail, how would I go about setting up, say Pine,
> to retrive my mail?
> 
> Neil...
> 

AFAIK sendmail, as its name implies, can be used only to send mail.  It can't
be used (directly) to fetch mail.  For that, I use - surprise, surprise -
fetchmail.  The Costales & Allman book, although large is well laid out, with
a tutorial section at the front which is about 1/3 of it.  If you take time
to work through it, sendmail becomes less of a mystery.  It is still bloody
difficult to comprehend a fully featured sendmail.cf file though!

The only way sendmail could be used to retrieve mail, is if you had your
own domain name assigned, and asked your ISP to forward mail to you, through
their mail exchanger.

I don't think Pine can be used to retrieve mail via POP3 (correct me if I'm
wrong).  It is just a mail user agent.  Fetchmail is my recommendation.


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