On Thu, Feb 16, 2023 at 12:27:37PM +0100, Andrew wrote: > *Do you know any recipe for using $ mail on the command line? Or a web link > that proposes one.* > > The man pages are great but they are meant for people with great technical > skills, which I am not.
What exactly are you trying to set up? Local mail works out of the box on a default OpenBSD install, so I'm assuming that what you want to do is to send and receive mail to other internet hosts without using a desktop/gui client, I.E. using the traditional built-in mail functionality typical of a unix-like system. This isn't particularly difficult, but it does depend to a certain extent on the configuration of your ISP, and also exactly how you want the system to behave. So it's not possible to give you a simple fixed list of steps to follow to 'make it work'. First up, the /usr/bin/mail utility in base is really a hard link to /usr/bin/mailx. This is a very simple command line mail tool, which you probably don't want to use as your mail email application because it's lacking many features. Other command line based mail programs are available in ports, such as mutt, which is widely used by openbsd developers. Then you need to set up smtpd to handle your inbound and outbound mail. For outbound mail, you _probably_ want to, (and need to), relay it via your ISP's 'smarthost', but we would need more information to know this for certain and to give specific advice on how to set it up. For inbound mail, you have several choices: * Run your own MX on a fixed IP broadband link. * Pick up your mail via POP3 or IMAP from within the mail user agent, (such as mutt), and feed it in to your local mail spools that way. * Pick up your mail via POP3 or IMAP and feed it into the local mail system. * Run your own MX on your own server or VM somewhere, and relay it to your own local, private MX. * Other options also exist. If you are new to this, then you probably want the second option. Maybe the third. > And web pages are full of phoney tips which rarely work. Agreed. > I hope that this is the right place for asking such questions. Yes, it is. But we can't give you a step-by-step guide without a bit more information.
