On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 04:33:07AM +, Tadimeti Keshav wrote:
hi all,
I know MUTAs are used to fetch mail from POP servers
and send mails (via SMTP) such as HOTPOP.com
Hmmm...
MUA -- Mail User Agent: the program a user uses to read and send mail
MTA -- Mail Transport Agent: a daemon process that routes e-mail
between hosts
Not sure what a MUTA is, but it sounds like something you wouldn't
want to meet down a dark alleyway...
I am confused what I should install.
Mutt,pine,fetchmail...
All I need is Microsoft outlook functionality. I am
more than happy to use curses/CLI based mail clients.
mutt or pine are CLI e-mail programs (I prefer mutt as you can see
from the headers of this message, but pine is possibly a bit
friendlier to the beginner): both of those have the capability to read
mail out of a POP mailbox. However, they expect to have a local
sendmail (or qmail or exim or postfix or other MTA) instance that they
can inject e-mail into for sending messages. Which MTA you use is
pretty much a religious thing, but the quickest one to get working
will be sendmail (as it's installed as part of the system by default)
and all you need do is:
# cd /etc/mail
# make
# vi `hostname`.mc
-- find the section of the file that says this:
dnl Dialup users should uncomment and define this appropriately
dnl define(`SMART_HOST', `your.isp.mail.server')
and edit it to take away the 'dnl' commenting and insert the name of
the SMTP server your ISP supplies:
dnl Dialup users should uncomment and define this appropriately
define(`SMART_HOST', `smtp.example.com')
Nb. don't get confused by the quote marks: the left hand quote mark
_`_ is different to the right hand one _'_. Just a feature of the way
the m4(1) macro processor works.
Then process that into a sendmail configuration file, install it and
restart sendmail:
# make
# make install
# make restart
fetchmail(1) isn't a MUA as such -- it's a mail transport that can
pull messages out of a POP or IMAP server and re-inject them into
sendmail. Or it can hand the messages off directly to a program like
procmail(1) for immediate local delivery. I'd not worry about
fetchmail(1) until you've got your MUA setup first, and then only if
you have a lot of POP mail accounts all over the place.
If you want something a lot more like Outlook, then there are several
full featured graphical MUAs. There's the Mail/News client which is
part of Mozilla, or the more recent Thunderbird. There's Ximian
Evolution (probably the closest thing to OE in the ports) and kmail
comes as part of KDE. All of those should be able to speak SMTP
directly to your ISP's server, so no need to bother with a local MTA
on that score.
Cheers,
Matthew
--
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 26 The Paddocks
Savill Way
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Marlow
Tel: +44 1628 476614 Bucks., SL7 1TH UK
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