help!! email setup

[optech]

is there a program that uses pop3 for email retrieval that doesn't need sendmail configed? and what is sendmail?
i thought it was just a network msging thing, but i think i may be wrong...
is it a central email config thing?


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my love for you is ticking clock, berzeeerrrrrrker...
would you like to suck my **** berzeeeerrrrrrker.....

[milanuk]

Originally posted by optech:
is there a program that uses pop3 for email retrieval that doesn't need sendmail configed?

Yes. It's called fetchmail (gotta love those *nix names). It is designed to connect to your ISP's mail server, retrieve your mail, and hand it off to whatever is listening at port 25(smtp), which is usually something like sendmail, postfix, or others. Fetchmail can be configured to hand off straight to procmail, which will process it according to either system-wide or user-specific config files.

and what is sendmail?
i thought it was just a network msging thing, but i think i may be wrong...
is it a central email config thing?


Sendmail is a Mail Transport Agent, or MTA. Procmail is a Mail Delivery Agent, or MDA. The program you use to read and compose mail, like pine or mutt, is a Mail User Agent, or MUA. Programs like Netscape, can be something of a conglomeration. They can retrieve your mail, filter it, read it, compose it, and send it. But they give up some flexibility and functionality.

An MUA is what normal users use to read and write mail. You compose mail, and the MUA hands it off to the MTA. The MTA is responsible for getting mail to the right system, whether it is another machine on your LAN, or around the world. It talks to other MTA's and they get the mail where it needs to go. Once a mail (incoming) has been received for a user, the MTA hands off to an MDA which puts the mail in the right place. As an example, procmail can filter your mail, placing stuff from mailing lists in their own 'folder', stuff from your significant other in another folder, send spam to /dev/null (black hole), and automatically respond to others, depending on how you set it up.

That said, sendmail is like the mother of all MTA's. About a year or so ago, the stats were that something like 75% of the internet email travels across sendmail systems. But it is huge, very hard to configure by hand, and has had a bad security record, though nothing major for awhile now. postfix, qmail, and exim were written as replacements for sendmail, and all perform that well, though sendmail is still hanging on as the 'standard' for huge systems.


Monte

[Boris]

Whew! I was about to post the same question, glad I got it answered. http://www.linuxnewbie.org/ubb/smile.gif Monte, thanks for such a well-written and in-depth answer, I really appreciate it. Peace!

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--"Forget the Beaver. The -Penguin- is a noble and proud animal...err...mascot!"--

[Pierre Lambion]

There is also getmail.py. It will do the same job as fetchmail except that it will deliver directly to your maildir. No need for any sendmail/qmail/... or procmail.

It is very (really) easy to configure.

P.

[theoenophile]

A related question. Is is possible to user Netscape Communicator to do this without sendmail configured? I just setup Netscape to do this a while back and don't remember touching sendmail.

[optech]

Yeah, i just finished doing that... i haven't even looked at sendmail or fetchm,ail yet