[sorry for the length, but in writing this i realized that the info might be useful to other people, so i'm sending to the list as well as to johan.]
> I have succeeded in sending a test message to myself from Elm and by > telnetting my ISP I could see that the message arrived. good! that's half the battle! > I have installed smail, elm end tkmail. What I want to know is how to get > smail to read my incoming mail from the Internet Service Provider. smail doesn't read email from your ISP; it's only for distributing email from your users (ie, you) to other hosts, and *accepting* incoming mail for you from other hosts on the net. the latter might sound like what you need, but if you're connecting via a standard dialup line to a provider who receives your mail for you, what you really want is is a POP (Post Office Protocol) client. this is a small program, run either interactively (via the shell) or automatically (via `cron') that gets any waiting email for you from your ISP's mail host. if you were connected full-time to the net (if your modem is connected to your ISP 24 hours a day, or you have some higher speed connection like frame relay, T1, etc.) and wanted to receive email directly to your computer rather than going through the mail host at your ISP, then it makes sense to run your own mail server (see below for more details). but you probably don't need to do that. there's a POP client in the debian distribution called (guess!) `popclient'. popclient will make a connection to the host where your mail is stored, transfer the messages to your computer, and then remove them from the mail host storage. i found the most recent version of popclient in the debian distribution as: unstable/binary-i386/mail/popclient_3.05-3.deb (unfortunately, the setup of popclient has changed over the last several versions, and it's sometimes hard to keep up with how it works. i'll document what i've gotten to work with the above version.) first, create a file called `.poprc' in your home directory, which contains a line like this: server HOST username USER password PASSWORD protocol pop3 fetchall replace `HOST' with the name of your mail host, `USER' with your username on that host, and `PASSWORD' with your password of your mail account on that host. (don't put the first spaces in (before `server'); that's just indentation for the clarity of this message.) for security reasons, popclient won't run unless the permissions of the file allows only the owner (you) to read and write the file (this is so no one can see your password). to set the file permissions, type (assuming you're in your home directory): % chmod 0600 .poprc then, when you want to check your email, do: % popclient then: % elm > What is smtp? `smtp' stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (not send-mail-transport protocol, as someone else said). it's a widely used standard for sending email messages from one computer to another. (if you're interested in the nitty-gritty, you can read the technical specification of the protocol in RFC822, available at: http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/htbin/rfc/rfc822.html) normally, you shouldn't need to worry about smtp -- it runs behind the scenes. if you use elm to compose and send a message, elm asks smail to deliver the message. smail makes a connection to either your mail host or the host of the recipient of the message (depending on how smail is configured), and transfers the message. for most people who get their net connections via a standard dialup, smtp is used *only* for outgoing email, and a POP client is used for incoming email. if you *are* connected fulltime, *and* your computer has a domain name (not just your mail host, but your actual machine), other mailers on other machines can send mail directly to your machine by making a connection to your smtp server (`smtpd'; `d' is for daemon, basically meaning a system process rather than a user process), and deliver the messages that way. > Some of the smail-documentation told me to put a line in > inetd.conf to invoke smptd, but I could not find a file with that name on my > computer. > > There was also a suggestion that I could put "sendmail -bs" in the file > /etc/rc. I could not find such a file either. you shouldn't need to do either of these. i'm not certain, but i believe both of these things are trying to do the same thing: configure your computer so it is always running an smtp server. > Do I need biff if I have a dialup ppp connection? all biff does is alert you when you have new mail *on your local system*; it doesn't know that new mail arrived on your mail host, and it doesn't care how the mail got to your local machine. if you're running popclient by hand (eg, from the shell), you probably don't need to use biff. but if you run it some other way (via `cron'), biff can be nice because it tells you in some detail (by showing the message headers) when new mail has arrived. and if you *are* connected fulltime and are running a mail server (smtpd), biff can also be helpful. > I tried to use rmail, but do not know which address to use in the command > line. If I use my own email-address, nothing happens. When I press Ctrl-C I > get the message that some process was interrupted and the mail deleted. > Which mail? you don't want to be running `rmail' yourself -- that's something that elm should be running for you (if it's run at all; it's mostly a holdover from the old days when email was sent via UUCP rather than over TCP/IP networks). you should stick to elm, or pine, or whatever it is that you use as a mail client. hope this helps. john -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
