Dear all, I have not had to manage my mail _primarily_ on my home computer since 1992, when I had a nice little UUCP setup using mailx with MKS Toolkit and DOS 3.3, which worked brilliantly.
I am now trying to get set up with a Unix shell environment and Mutt on my WIN2000 machine. MKS Toolkit still uses mailx.exe, which is too far out of date to be useful, and not even MKS seems to be supporting UUCP anymore. I have installed Cygwin plus Unixmail (http://unixmail-w32.sourceforge.net/) -- a suite of Mutt plus Fetchmail -- but this has not worked entirely as expected, and there are too many gaps in the Cygwin approach; not being a programmer, I'm not up to compiling/tweaking things like procmail, enscript, pcal, grepmail, etc, on my own. To (hopefully) put an end to this misery, my local sysops are going to help me install Suse Linux within VMWare on top of WIN2000, which will let me run the standard Linux tools. Having gotten this far, however, I must confess I am a bit confused about the philosophy of the current Fetchmail-type approach versus the older UUCP approach. With UUCP, I never had to worry whether I was online or not -- connections would be established and mail would move back and forth in the background. With fetchmail, I understand the part about fetching mail, but I do not understand what is supposed to happen with outgoing mail. After installing the Unixmail suite I tried sending messages while offline and monitored changes in the filesystem to try to understand what was happening. As near as I can tell, I simply got an error message in Mutt and the unsent message remained in /tmp (without outgoing headers). When I typed commands like "cat report.txt | mutt [EMAIL PROTECTED]" the mail simply disappeared into a black hole. Am I missing something obvious? What do you have to do have "store and forward" functionality today? Isn't that (in most cases) the ideal? Tom ---- Dr. Thomas Baker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Birlinghoven Library, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft mobile +49-171-408-5784 Institutszentrum Schloss Birlinghoven work +49-30-8109-9027 53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany fax +49-2241-14-2619
