On Sun, Jan 21, 2001 at 12:12:58PM +0100, Daniel de los Reyes wrote: > It's taking me a bit of time to understand I few things about how Mutt, > Fetchmail and Procmail work together (I am moving from kmail). > > I use exim to send mail and fetch my mail from my ISP's pop server. > > I think the process should be: > > Fetchmail fetches my mail from my ISP's pop server and handles it to Procmail
or your local MTA which can either deliver the mail or hand it to
procmail.
> (when set this way of course, if it wasn't would it be stored in
> /var/spool/mail/user? )
if your MTA does not hand it to procmail then yes. of course if
procmail is not configured to put mail anywhere it still goes in
/var/mail/user (/var/spool/mail is an obsolete symlink for backword
compatibility)
> Procmail places mail received from fetchmail using exim, in different folders
that doesn't sound right, but then im not familier with exim. exim is
a transport agent, procmail is a delivery agent. the delivery agent
is what places mail into a mailspool. (/var/mail/user)
normally mail goes to MTA (port 25) -> delivery agent (either a simple
one with the MTA or procmail) -> /var/mail/user or whereever the MDA
(procmail) decides to put it.
> under ~/Mail (I did set it this way) messages that don't match any of
> Procmail's rules are left in /var/spool/mail/user?
yes.
> Then I run Mutt. Mutt first checks under what I set as the spool file
> (/var/spool/mail/user) is the equivalent to what used to be ~/Mail/Inbox?
no /var/mail/user is your user mailbox. that is where all new mail is
delivered unless you redirect it elsewhere via procmail rules.
~/Mail/Inbox will never get mail unless you take special action to
make it get mail.
for some incomprehensible reason Kmail likes to pretend its a windows
mail client and that /var/mail/user is a POP3 server and moves all
mail from /var/mail/user and puts it in ~/Mail/Inbox. this makes no
sense to me really.
> However if I close Mutt everything in there gets moved to ~/Mail/mbox, I
> don't understand this behaviour.
niether do i, thats why i always add this to my ~/.muttrc:
set nomove
> I made a setting to tell mutt which folders to look for new mail, these were
> all folders to which Procmail was supposed to move mail to. Does that mean
> that when I open Mutt it will show me all new messages in those folders?
> Or do I have to pass through all of them to check for new mail?
i assume you mean something like this:
mailboxes ! =in-bugtraq \
=in-debian-devel \
=in-debian-devel-announce
and so one. these are mailbox files under ~/Mail (the = means ~/Mail
to mutt, ! means /var/mail/user or whatever your $MAIL variable is)
mutt will simply inform you when these mailboxes recieve new mail, in
order to see the mail you need to use the `c' command to change to
that mailbox. mutt will by default suggest the first known mailbox to
have new mail.
> Could someone please help me with this, I am quite confused and I really want
> to move to mutt.
HTH
--
Ethan Benson
http://www.alaska.net/~erbenson/
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