On Thu, 24 Apr 1997, Albert Carter wrote:

> Hey there,
> 
>    This is going to be a long one what I hope by doing this is to help both
> myself and others on this list that might not know how to get mail working
> on a new system because I'm completely lost on this.  I've been reading the
> Unix System Administration Handbook that was recomended and all it talks
> about is sendmail and from the sounds I'm way to busy to get sendmail
> working so I'm looking into other options but I have questions on all three
> programs that I've listed.
> 
>    1) sendmail:
> As sendmail goes it sounds very time consuming to get set up but sounds
> very handy and useful.  Right now I don't have time to set it up but I
> would like to know if its as hard as everywhere says it is?  What it does?
> If you can use programs like pine with it or not?  The whole story pretty
> much.  I would also like to know the Unix System Administration Handbook
> talks about 3 main versions.  It discusses V5, IDA, and V8.  From reading
> the man on sendmail it only says something about V6.  What are the
> differences between this version and the ones that the book talks about?

Worked out of the box (well, the ftp...) for me.  I have never tried to
configure the damn thing (yeah, I've read the Unix System Administrator's
Handbook too, and it sounds pretty scary!) You should be able to send SMTP
mail without any configuration at all.  Get online with PPP (or whatever)
and type "mail jhsterne@mindspring.com" (that would be me) and send a
message ("testing..." would be fine).  Post to the mailing list that you
did, and I'll let you know if it came through.


> 
>    2) pine:
> I use it everyday at work so I know how to use it the only thing is I don't
> know how flexible it is.  Can I use pine to get the mail from my ISP's POP3
> client and send it out through the ISP's SMTP client.  If so how do I do
> this?  Also where is the best place to put pine and pico the editor that
> comes with it.  Despite the fact that I'll use pico because since I've been
> working on NetBSD all I've been using is vi and I've gotten used to it and
> found that it can be very flexible.

POPclient should fetch your mail from your pop server for you and drop it
in /var/mail/<whatever> so that you can read it from pine.


> 
>    3) POPclient
> I was told that this in combination with pine would work to help me get my
> mail.  I see that it will but I can't figure out if it will allow me to get
> all my mail from my ISP's POP3 server and send everything in that popbox to
> my one local user that I specify.  If it will do this someone please tell
> me how to do this.  Right now I have mailmapping set up on my host (which
> allows <any>@host.domain.com to go to my one popbox.  I do this because I
> use different names for different things and because I've been planning on
> getting unix up and going for sometime now.  I'm just getting around to
> doing it.  So if anyone knows of how I can get it to do that please let me
> know also where would I put the untar'd files from the POPclient tar file.
> Oh the POPclient version I have is the one that's pre-compiled for NetBSD
> Amiga port this is the one I was recommended to use.
> 

It works fine. Really. Try this script:

p=`ls /var/run | grep ppp..pid`
if [ -n "$p" ]; then
popclient -3 -s -u <username for ISP> -p <password for ISP> -o 
/var/mail/<mailbox for your username on your NetBSD box> <whitespace>
<ISP's FQDN for POP3 server>
   else
fi

Sorry, this got mangled a bit.  The 3 lines starting with popclient
should be on one line... Try it, though. (PPP must be up, or it won't
work!) Once it runs, then just type pine or mail.

J.