On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 07:14:07PM +1100, Matt - wrote:
> I am looking for a brief introduction to Mutt, I
> have searched for a few guides on the internet
> but am actually still having trouble finding out
> how to specify my mail servers.

you don't basically.
It's true you can make mutt retrieve mail from a pop server
(only one though) but don't bother, use fetchmail to do it for you.

For doco, have you checked /usr/doc/mutt* on your system?
there's manuals and faqs etc that come with it (or see www.mutt.org).

Mutt is simply a mail reader.
So to do what you want you would normally have 3 programs
working together:
- fetchmail to retrieve your pop email
- mutt to read it and compose email (MUA - mail user agent)
- sendmail/postfix/exim/ssmtp (or whatever) to send the email
out to your ISP (MTA - mail transfer agent)

This is the traditional unix way of having small simple programs
each doing a single job well.

> I also don't understand the local mail server
> concept. Is it true that it's common practice to
> have a mail server on my system constantly receive
> mail and then offer it to my email programs - it
> seems like most email programs want to check "local
> mail" by default".

yes, in the case I've described above the MTA is your local
mail server which receives the email (from fetchmail in this
case) and stores it in /var/mail (or /var/spool/mail).

So fetchmail retrieves the email from your ISP, passes it to
your local MTA which stores it in /var/mail ready to be read
by your MUA (ie. mutt).

Dave.

-- 
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug

Reply via email to