Lev Lvovsky wrote: > why the insistence on fetchmail?
Without fetchmail or something like it, if your network is down when you decide to run your mail client, you can't check your mail server for new messages. Even if the network is up, you have to wait while the client connects to the server and downloads all your new mail (which may take a while). With fetchmail, mail retrieval, filtering, and sorting is a background task that the system can do whenever the network is up. When you start your mail client, your mail is already there for you to read. Even if the network is currently down, you'll have all your mail up to the point that it went down. Also, with fetchmail, you don't have to bother telling your mail client about your POP or IMAP server -- it's one less thing to configure if you happen to switch mail clients. Most of us don't do this very often, so it's a minor point, but still nice. I also like to run a local SMTP server, because then I can even send mail when the network is down (though of course the local SMTP server will have to queue outgoing mail until the network comes back up). With both fetchmail and a local SMTP server, your MUA doesn't need to know about any servers other than localhost, and doesn't have to be running for your mail to come and go. Craig
