At 08:13 AM 11/18/00, you wrote: i continue to have problems setting up my email configuration. I have run eximconfig but have had trouble working out how to answer some of the questions I am not sure what is meant by some of the terms i.e. what is my visible mail name. To be honest i have used the default settings to set up exim i have no idea in most cases whether this is correct. I am dialling up to my isp using pon, I can't fine where to set up the isp smtp info re sending mail.
>>> Isn't this one of the last questions eximconfig asks you? Think so. <<< Fetchmail seems to be ok but where does it write the emails to. I have installed mutt but when i run it i get the message that there is no /var/spool/mail/jmj directory jmj being my user name. Apparently exim should set this up for me/ I am truly at a loss. >>> I've just spent several evenings puzzling over an identical or similar problem. The usual location for mailboxes (which are files, not directories, as I initially thought) is /var/spool/mail. For reasons I don't understand, the default Debian 2.2 setup makes this a symbolic (I think symbolic, not hard) link to /var/mail. You see this from ls -l /var/spool which shows mail -> ../mail at the end of the line for mail. Mailboxes are thus in /var/mail. To see them do ls -l /var/mail The mailbox for some_user should be named and owned by some_user, the group should be mail, and the permissions should be -rw-rw----. You may have to create these files using touch, chown, chgrp and chmod to get the ownership and permissions right. If I remember rightly, touch some_user chown new_user new_user chgrp mail new_user chmod 660 new_user will do it. In my case, I messed up the default configuration and had the same problem with mutt not seeing my mailbox. Creating the above link and file solved the problem. <<< Mutt is also supposed to make a file called .muttrc in my home directory but this does not exist, apparently without it i cant specify which MTA i am using. >>> I don't think you need to specify exim in .muttrc. If I understand correctly, exim appends incoming mail to user's mailboxes in /var/spool/mail or, in this case, /var/mail. mutt looks for it in /var/spool/mail, which is linked to /var/mail. What mutt needs to know is where to look for the mailbox, not what MTA put the mail there. <<< Is there a mutt configuration script. If you have any idea how to proceed. >>>You probably don't need this to solve your immediate problem. I don't know of any script, but see the mutt home page for examples of configuration files. Go to http://www.mutt.org/ and more specifically http://www.mutt.org/links.html#config and perhaps more specifically still the (especially for newbies) link to Telsa Gwynne's site. <<< If it would be easier to use another MTA i am happy to do so although i hear that exim is the best. >>>Again, this probably isn't your problem, so suggest sticking with exim for the present. To investigate problems, look at the main exim log file, /var/log/exim/mainlog using more, less, vi, etc. Initially I had the mailbox locking problem described in Q0201 of the exim FAQ (http://www.exim.org/FAQ.html). After creating the link and mailbox files described above this problem stopped. <<< thanks for your help very confused >>> Hang in there! I'm trying to set up unix style email with exim/fetchmail/mutt/procmail after many years of Eudora. It isn't coming easily, in part because documenation, voluminous as it is, doesn't address all someone new to this setup needs to know. I'm still puzzling out my own setup. <<< jm
