[plug] help and comment

[Christian]

navarre at omen.net.au wrote:

> 1) Text based email client. I have tried Mutt and currently using Elm
>    and find these lacking in many of the features in use in DOS and
>    Windows email readers. Most imporant are mail lists and the ability
>    to save you owb outgoing mail.

I don't use either elm or mutt but I would have thought they would
support the ability to save outgoing mail... (actual users of these
programs can suggest more).  As for "mailing lists", I'm not sure what
you mean.  If you mean mailing list filtering then you want procmail. 
If you mean managing large mailing lists then you want majordomo.  If
you mean mailing to multiple recipients then I'm sure these clients must
support this!  If they really truly do not support these features (or
you just find you don't like the clients), then try pine.  A lot of
people find it very usable and user-friendly.

> 2) Samba CLient. I am operarting a Sparc IPC debianised in a NT environment
>    and I would like to be able to access the shared drives and perhaps the
>    printer. I scanned the samba doco looking for a quick setup of just the
>    client. Most of the doco seems focused on the NT boxes connecting to
>    the Linux box, I do not want it to work this way.

This is covered in the SMB-HOWTO where it discusses use of "smbclient". 
You can also mount shared drives directly onto the filesystem although
I've never done this so other people can probably provide additional
suggestions if this is what you want.

> 3) I have fetchmail working fine as a daemon but its startup is manual,
>    where in the startup is the recommended place to invoke fetchmail.

Most email clients by default manually get you to request a mail check
on start up (in order to put in a password) so this is not unusual
behaviour.  If you want it automated then one solution might be to write
a little wrapper shell script which starts fetchmail (in so-called
"daemon" mode) and then starts your mail client.  Perhaps other people
can suggest more elegant solutions.

> 4) Are there any members using emacs that know how to configure it and
>    can answer some configuration questions of list? I have several
>    machines and I would like to make them behave much the same including X.

I use vim. :-)

Regards,

Christian.