Setting Up E-mail

In my time on IRC (Internet Relay Chat), I found that the number one problem newbies have, after setting up PPP, is e-mail setup. Many people get their e-mail half-working and leave it at that, for fear of breaking it and not knowing how to fix it.

Mail handling is split up between several types of programs, instead of having everything handled by a single program (such as Eudora). Trust me, it is conceptually easy, and once you understand it, very quick and easy to set up. It also gives you a lot of flexibility.

I've included three sidebars which you may wish to read first; in particular, the Glossary for definitions of terms I will be using. Although there are alternative programs, I'll discuss the ones that I use.

Glossary

First, you need to get an e-mail account set up by your ISP with mail delivered to their machine. Then, you need to know your ISP's domain and your password on the mail server (usually the same as the password you use when you start up PPP). For the examples in this article, we will call the ISP domain foo.com, the user name barney and the password f00bar.

To begin, you need the following programs or their alternatives:

To find out if these programs are installed on your system, use the command which. If you type which program at the prompt, the pathname of that program, if it exists in your path, will be returned to the screen. For example, which might return the path /usr/bin/program, letting you know that program is in the /usr/bin/ directory. All of the basic distributions (Slackware, Debian and Red Hat) usually include all of these programs except fetchpop, so you should have no problem finding and installing them.

fetchpop sources can be downloaded from http://snakepit.wasteland.org/fetchpop.tgz (special thanks to TheAsp for hosting this prepatched version on his server so downloading it from Sunsite is unnecessary).

For this example, Pine is your MUA (mail user agent). You use it to read and write mail. Start up pine by typing pine at the prompt. When you see the opening screen, type s to call up the setup menu, then type c to go to the configuration screen. Now do the following steps.

To send mail from the prompt or in a script, type:

pine person@address.com < message.file

Use smail or sendmail as the MTA (mail transport agent). You use it to transport mail between machines. People have written 600 page books on setting up these programs. The horror stories are numerous. For this simple application, in most cases, you don't have to do any set up. If you use Slackware, Debian or Red Hat, the default setups for smail and sendmail work fine right out of the box.

Some installation scripts may ask you whether to use a smarthost, which means it will hand mail to your ISP's mail server so it can do the delivery. That decision is up to you. There's not much difference. If you plan to receive mail on your machine, you might want to look at the /etc/aliases file some day.

If your user name at your ISP is barney@foo.com and you wish this name to show up in the From: header, use sendmail to handle it by taking the following steps:

Sometimes smail or sendmail will die. You will then get a pine error message saying the SMTP connection is not available . If this occurs, log in as root and type smail -bd or sendmail -bd. If this type of failure happens consistently, the first thing to check is your /etc/rc* directories to be sure that your SMTP server is started at boot up.