> There's just a stand-alone box (with Slink & Potato) - I dial an ISP > when I feel like it and get mail from lists and very little personal > mail. Little in the manuals seems needed, but there's a mass of > detail to wade through. > > Its seems I need:- > > a. ppp -should be ok there. > b. something to fetch mail - should be ok with fetchmail. > c. a program to filter the incoming mail - procmail may do me, and as > I've some info on rules syntax, I have hopes - but what is > 'formail' should be with procmail but I can't find it. > d. a 'reader and composer' - will try mutt, but shall struggle there. > e. an MTA to send my outgoing stuff - I'll try sSMTp which is > supposed to be 'minimalistic' - that seems true, very few > options. Can't work out how it will know how to send mail. > f. Initially, I'll leave junkbuster, pgp, ssh etc for the time being. > > Anyone kind enough to let me know if I'm on the right road? I know > some of the apparently popular alternatives ( I can install exim but > feel I'll need a higher degree in martian magic to configure either > it or sendmail). A brief explanation of how the various programs are > aware of each other, would also clear some of the fog.
It seems like you actually have the basics figured out. Your email client (mutt, balsa, whatever) lets you compose the message, then forwards it to your MTA. This handles the routing for the email - it will send to other accounts on your box, or forward it to the outside world if need be. Most of the MTA's (sendmail, exim, smail, whatever) will let you tell them to use an external program to assist in the routing - so if you want to have all the mail from one mailing list dumped in a seperate folder from your personal mail, you can have sendmail deliver the mail to your account, and then have procmail filter it. Finally, fetchmail retrieves your mail from a remote host and gives it to the MTA, which then delivers it to the appropriate account. This is really a gross oversimplification - if you want a complete walkthrough, http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/Mail-Administrator-HOWTO provides a much better description than I can. Basically, your MTA handles all the routing on your network (even if it's a standalone box, it still thinks of itself as a network) and sends to outside. The fetchmail and procmail programs work alongside the MTA, and all the email clients should basically just work, once you have the underlying programs set up, and it shouldn't matter which client you use. Good luck, Steve
