[plug] Sendmail, etc

[Terry Porter]

On Sun, 19 Jul 1998, John Darrington wrote:

> > 
> > 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!
I agree! I use Sendmail, and did use Fetchmail, see "linuxconfigure"
below.
> 
> 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.
This is what I do, although I used fetchmail with no probs before then.
> 

> 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.
> 
I agree, pine is just a mail reader, as far as I can tell, Pine is my mail
reader of choice.

One other point, I used the "Linuxconfigure" program to set up Sendmail,
dns etc and it made things heaps easier. It also opens up plenty of other
cans of worms, regarding your 'supossedly ok' system :-)

terry