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#1 2010-10-11 06:45:00

apefish
Member
From: Vancouver
Registered: 2010-07-13
Posts: 47

Setting up mail

Hi!
I'd like to set up mail. Ive been increasingly annoyed with the various webmails, and I've realised that I really just want to say "nano email ; mail foo@bar.baz < email" to mail someone and "mail" to read my mail, and have the system say "you has mail" when I log in.

The standard unix mail looks like the right sort of thing. I've looked at the wiki, read some man pages and run some searches, but all the doc I can find is esoteric or assumes I'm already using some other client.  I did pacman -S ssmtp as it seemed like the right thing to do, but I still can't even mail between users.

I hate to be such a noob, but can anyone help me figure this out? I am currently using my university (web)email, but I'd be glad to ditch it if it meant I could do the above commands. I suppose it would be nice to still use it if possible though.

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#2 2010-10-11 07:35:40

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Setting up mail


neutral

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#3 2010-10-11 08:09:21

custom
Member
From: Nuremberg
Registered: 2009-03-29
Posts: 5

Re: Setting up mail

You need a .mailrc in $HOME:

cat .mailrc
set sendmail="/usr/bin/msmtp"

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#4 2010-10-11 08:09:59

custom
Member
From: Nuremberg
Registered: 2009-03-29
Posts: 5

Re: Setting up mail

...

Last edited by custom (2010-10-11 08:22:24)

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#5 2010-10-11 11:01:21

Dieter@be
Forum Fellow
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-11-05
Posts: 2,000
Website

Re: Setting up mail

sand_man wrote:

nice article, explains some basics which other tutorials assume knowledge of.
however, how relevant is this still? isn't postfix/courrier more commonly used?
also, more interesting questions: what are all the mailbox formats, how does the "you have x new messages" @ login thing work?

Last edited by Dieter@be (2010-10-11 11:04:36)


< Daenyth> and he works prolifically
4 8 15 16 23 42

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#6 2010-10-11 20:39:20

apefish
Member
From: Vancouver
Registered: 2010-07-13
Posts: 47

Re: Setting up mail

sand_man wrote:

I'll look at that, thanks. May not be what I'm looking for though.

I'll keep trying to figure this out.

To be clear, I have a mailbox on the university server, I'd like something to automatically pull my messages down from there, and route my outgoing mail in some way so that it gets to the reciever and they can reply and the reply ends up back at my mailbox. How much cooperation does this require from the server, and what do I have to do on my end with what config files?

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#7 2010-10-11 20:47:30

skanky
Member
From: WAIS
Registered: 2009-10-23
Posts: 1,847

Re: Setting up mail

Even if you don't end up using mutt, this might be useful: http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/ (it lays out the parts of a mail system, how one MUA - mutt - fits in and some of the that apps exist to do the various aspects of a full client.

From your OP, you may also find this one interesting: http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/


"...one cannot be angry when one looks at a penguin."  - John Ruskin
"Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is." - scepticisle

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#8 2010-10-12 09:09:25

sand_man
Member
From: Australia
Registered: 2008-06-10
Posts: 2,164

Re: Setting up mail

postfix and others are drop-in replacements for sendmail so yes it is still relevant.
The postfix website has pretty decent docs http://www.postfix.org/BASIC_CONFIGURATION_README.html

Last edited by sand_man (2010-10-12 09:15:46)


neutral

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#9 2010-10-12 10:51:57

Dieter@be
Forum Fellow
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-11-05
Posts: 2,000
Website

Re: Setting up mail

skanky wrote:

From your OP, you may also find this one interesting: http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

From what i gathered, nmh, although having a nice design, is lacking and buggy. (ie no utf8 support)


< Daenyth> and he works prolifically
4 8 15 16 23 42

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#10 2010-10-12 10:59:12

skanky
Member
From: WAIS
Registered: 2009-10-23
Posts: 1,847

Re: Setting up mail

Dieter@be wrote:
skanky wrote:

From your OP, you may also find this one interesting: http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

From what i gathered, nmh, although having a nice design, is lacking and buggy. (ie no utf8 support)

It's suffered from a lack of updates - the mime and utf8 support are probably lacking somewhat, yes.
What it really needs is someone who wants a cmd line email client to take over the updates. There plenty of people who use it, but (from the mailing list its seems) the itches that remain are not strong enough to provoke more development amongst the current maintainers. There are also some who would rather start to add stuff like improved smtp support rather than mime etc. It's a shame because I've considered switching to it on a few occasions. If I could write C I might even have had had a look at the code.

They did try to get a GSOC session last summer, but I don't think it came to much.

But for basic email it seems to work well enough - some people even use external scripts to deal with attachments etc.

That's all reading between the lines, so I could be wrong in some aspects.


"...one cannot be angry when one looks at a penguin."  - John Ruskin
"Life in general is a bit shit, and so too is the internet. And that's all there is." - scepticisle

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