Re: e-mail applications

[Al Hudson <nospam [at] york.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 1999, Martin P Holland wrote:

> My real point was that
> sendmail is fairly intimidating for a new user to linux

Yes, I agree with all your points Martin. I think the ideal would be that
people would write software that used send/fetch to do the work, and that
send/fetch were assumed to be set up and working on every machine. Of
course, this doesn't mean the user has to set it up - ideally it's a
software job, and I have to say I've never had to set up sendmail manually
for a long time, but then, I don't change distributions often either
(going to Mandrake soon though).

The problem with using built in pop/stmp support is it makes things worse
in the long run if you are accessing your email from more than one place.
Unless you're doing everything in a standard way, it gets hairy when you
start using Netscape et al who just clean out your pop account every time
they download mail and desposit it in some non-standard directory. I guess
this also doesn't necessarily apply to people who use standalone machines,
but it's something I have to do therefore is incredibly important ;)
Even though I'm currently exiled in York I do like to read my mail every
time I go home to the good ol' city of steel, and I have annoyed myself in
the past when I 'netscaped' my pop account :(

Cheers,

Alex.

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