Re: Pine

[Matthew Collins <nospam [at] janes.demon.co.uk>]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2000 14:12:43 -0000, "Richard" <richard [at] sheflug.co.uk>
wrote:

>Hello
>
>	I've been having a look into using Pine from my Linux box for 
>everything.  I've encountered several problems.
>
>1/  The help file is completely useless
>2/  Does it just work with sendmail or can I get it to work with POP3 
>?
>3/  My ISPs server does not recognise my richard [at] sheflug.co.uk 
>address if I use a Linux mail app to send or receive mail through 
>that address.  But it works fine with MS Windows.  Any ideas what 
>this is about ?
>4/  I've already sent this e-mail once.  It didn't get past my ISP.  
>I tried to send by POP3 and the server rejected it.  Had to send by 
>sendmail.  That didn't get through.  This is a Pegasus Mail message.
>5/  You might have noticed from the above comments that it's been 
>some time since I use Pine ? 
>
>
>Richard
>Sheffield UK

Right, you're like me. Been using Windows for email so long, that all
the different things have blurred together.

In Unix/Linux you have three things.

MTA - Mail Transport Agent
MDA - Mail Delivery Agent
MUA - Mail User Agent

Your MTA is usually something like Sendmail, or smail.
Your MDA is usually procmail.
MUA is pine, mutt, mailx, whatever.

Programs like netscape confuse the matter by attempting to be all
three.

All the MUA should do, is check your mail. Nothing else. It should be
able to send mail by talking to the local MTA. The MDA takes mail from
the MTA and delivers it to the users.

What you need to do is set up sendmail / smail as your MTA. Setup
procmail as your MDA. This is usually done by your distribution.
Setting up sendmail can be a bit of a black art, but if you work from
someones exisiting configuration it is not too hard.

You don't send mail by POP3. You use SMTP, always. I've personally
never, ever heard of Sending mail by POP3.

To collect mail by POP3, use fetchmail. This then talks to your MTA.
So fetchmail will collect mail from POP3, and then deliver it to your
MTA. Makes it transparant.

Steps are.

1./ Setup sendmail to talk to your ISP's SMTP server.
2./ Setup procmail. This should be as simple as installing it.
3./ Setup fetchmail to talk to your pop3 server.
4./ Setup whatever MUA you want. (Pine, elm, mutt etc etc).

There is a script that runs on debian to set up sendmail to talk to an
ISP's SMTP server.

One thing I havn't managed to do yet is to get my mail sorted into
separate folders. I subscribe to several mailing lists, and I like to
have the mail sorted into folders for each list. In Windows this is an
easy point and click affair. I still havn't worked out how to do this
in Linux yet. If anybody can give me any pointers it would be much
appriciated. Preferably using mutt, but anything would be a start.
-- 
Matthew Collins
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