sendmail is driving me round the BEND!! I can't send mail!
> PINE is the easiest to use of the three, IMHO, and has many useful
> features.
YEah, I'm the most familiar with pine, and it seems the most capable of
the character mode mailers.
> Ok, Here's my current setup: I use PINE to read and write mail. Pine
> hands sent mail to sendmail. Fetchmail gets my mail from my POP mailbox
> every 20 seconds. It's almost as if mail were getting directly routed to
> my mailbox. It's a nice setup :). It's not too hard to setup either...
> just use fetchmailconf to setup fetchmail, and change two or three lines
> in /etc/sendmail.cf, and you're all set.
This is helpful and I understand what you're saying -- sounds like a
great setup and very similar to what I want to set up.... BUT:
I've been agonizing over sendmail -- about 5 sources of documentation
for 2 of the last 3 days. And I see why one writer called it the "black
art" of unix!! DAMN!! I can't get anywhere with this!! I can't get any
mail to send with pine or anything else. (I CAN use netscape no problem
-- but I need to set up these char mode mailers for my office and will
probably switch to it myself.)
I'm not even sure that sendmail is my basic problem! :-X But it
certainly is something I want to learn.
> Make sure pine uses localhost as
> the SMTP server, and you're done configuring. ;) It's not that hard, and
> it's pretty darned efficient.
Oh! Damn! I should've come back and read your e-mail again! I missed
that! OKay -- I'll try that! Why didn't any of the documentation tell
me that?!?
Since I'm not (yet)(one thing at a time) setting up mail for other local
users, will I need any aliases other than what are already in the
aliases file? I'm using redhat 5.2 with sendmail 8.8.7-2 I think. I
d/l'd 8.8.9-3 I think it is but it's not an rpm and I'm nore sure that's
the solution to my problem. I've been desperately trying everything but
all the while suspecting that the solution is simple and right in front
of my nose and I can't find it!
> Fetchmail and procmail do NOT do the same thing. Fetchmail works with
> sendmail which works with procmail. It's a chain. :)
This I DID remember from your message and it was VERY helpful. This is
the kind of general perspective I was missing. I successfully set up
fetchmail -- no problem! :-) HAven't gotten into procmail yet. I hope
I'm not doing this out of sequence but it seemed to me I really need
sendmail. I explored for other alternatives and there don't seem to be
any for console e-mail. sendmail seems to be IT. <?> I'm eager to
demystify it but I'm not finding a good entry point yet. They all seem
to start in the middle.
One complication I may be entering into it --??-- is that I'm not using
my isp's smtp server --- (contrary to your advice above) this seems to
be where I'm confused -- anyway I'm using another mail service on the
particular setup I'm working on. It works in netscape messenger and
other e-mailers I've used in NT --- dialing into one isp but using the
pop and smtp servers of a different isp where I have an account. I must
be missing something really basic here as indicated by your advice to
use localhost as the smtp server. (now that I'm in linux I can bypass
my mailhost's smtp services to SEND and still use their
myhostname@theirdomain as my reply to: / from: address?!?
I see no option in pine to specify a different reply to address.
And in sendmail I see no place where I would supply a password for the
smtp host. I don't need one?
You can tell I'm sure that I'm really confused and missing something
very basic.
> > Another question is is the format for e-mail in linux consistent? That
> > is if I'm using say pine and switch to mutt am can I transfer my mail
> > dirs from pine to mutt (or just point mutt to the dir) and have the file
> > format be compatible?
>
> Yes. They all use the UNIX format mailbox if you have your system
> configured properly (usually, it's /var/spool/mail/username). You can
> then use any of the mail programs (PINE, Elm, Mutt, or even Netscape Mail
> on workstations). It'd be the users choice. Your best bet would be to
> let the users decide what they need. They can tell if they need
> fetchmail, and all that stuff. Give them the directions that they need to
> set the stuff up for their own account. :) This gives them the freedom
> and choices so that they're not constrained to whatever your decision is.
> Maybe there's someone that wants to use BSD mail. (I actually know
> someone that prefers that mail program over ANY other!) You should let
> them have that choice.
Great idea and a beautiful thing that the formats are standard! :-)
> > And are these formats compatible with netscape --
> > which I'm currently using for my own mail in imap mode (until I can get
> > ftape or some type of backup working in linux).
>
> They're all compatable with everything. Linux uses standardized formats.
> That's the beauty of it.
Love it!
> No, but you can ask questions and we can try to answer them :). That's
> why we're here! ;)
THANKS!!
Jamie
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Accelerated Music Mastery
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