Hi,

First off I am confused why you have exim installed: I thought smail was the 
default for stable.....guess I am wrong.

On Tue, Aug 17, 1999 at 09:29:12PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> Thanks for the quick response.
> Yes, it seems I can mail myself. I started "mail" and sent a message to
> "viggo" (my local username). It arrived promptly, and I was able to read it.
> I can not, however, find any file by that name (or any file at all) in my
> /home/viggo directory (using "dir" from an xterm, one the few recognizable
> commands to me from way back in them DOS-days).

OK, what you have proved is that local mail delivery works. In other words exim 
is capable of understanding mail from one user on the system to another user on 
the system.

Note that mail is not stored in your home dir specifically.  Mail initially is 
stored by the system in /var/spool/mail/<userid> which is one file with all the 
emails added (concatenated) on top of each other.  This single file format is 
the standard.  When you use a mail program such as mutt, pine, vm they have the 
option of either moving the mail from the spool file into a home dir file or 
not: for example Netscape uses file in ~/nsmail and vm (emacs email) uses 
~/INBOX

Fetchmail works by grabbing the POP3 email from the remote server and 
delivering it to the local machines SMTP port.  So you need to check if your 
machines SMTP email works.  You can do this by telneting to the local server on 
the smtp port (25) and doing exactly what a mail program does.  Here's an 
example anything without a code is what I typed:

bash-2.01$ telnet localhost 25
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-blah.dircon.co.uk Smail-3.2.0.102 (#2 1998-Oct-13) ready at Tue, 17 Aug 
1999 23:42:58 +0100 (BST)
220 ESMTP supported
helo la                 # this is me just providing a fake hostname
250 blah.dircon.co.uk Hello la (localhost from address [127.0.0.1]).
mail from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]    #here I specify who the mail is from
250 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ... Sender Okay
rcpt to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]      # here who the mail is for
250 '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' <steve@(nodomain)> Recipient Okay.
data                    # I now send the body of my email
354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
Hi,                     # my message
A test
.                       # end it with a . on a blank line
250 Mail accepted
quit                    # end with quit, you should get the mail
221 blah.dircon.co.uk closing connection
Connection closed by foreign host.

With these two components working your final link in the chain is fetchmail.  
If you are still having problems you could probably do with getting fethmail to 
log verbosely and send that output to the list.

If it's just you on your machine can I suggest using a mail program that has 
POP3 support - something like Balsa for X or mutt for commandline.

Argh! sorry this is so long!!

Steve

Reply via email to