On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Edwin Humphries wrote:
> The questions are:
>
> 1. If I don't use an MTA, how would I configure the WinNT email clients (Pegasus
>4)?
Use an MTA. It's just easier that way. More so now that Windows mail
clients are not using mbox mail format spools much anymore. I think that
Netscape and Eudora do, but all of MS's do not.
> 2. Can I use sendmail as the MTA? If so, how do I configure the getmail output?
Perhaps fetchmail would work better? It's geared toward delivering to an
MTA. If you want to use getmail, I imaging that you'd pipe the message to
an external command: '/usr/sbin/sendmail <username>'
> 3. What's an mbox?
Short for Mail Box. It's the "standard" UNIX mail spool format. Super
simple: one file, all the messages, new message is denoted by a line that
starts with the word "From ", including the space. Parsing large boxes
for a specific message is slow, since there's no index (though technically
you *could* have one in an external file or in a "special" message like
the one Pine uses). They're also notoriously problematic, since you can't
(or couldn't) always lock them properly over NFS, and they frequently got
corrupted. (They don't even need NFS to get corrupted, run out of the box
sendmail and Linux 2.0 and it'll happen on local disks!)
mbox is the reason Qmail, Postfix and Courier support Maildir's.
> 4. The piped to command seems a bit risky, according to the
> documentation: is it a good option to send the mail to sendmail? How
> would this work - would sendmail know which mailbox it should go to?
There's no reason for it to be unreliable, unless getmail doesn't do a
good job of making sure messages are delivered before flushing them from
the server.
--
If I had a dollar for every brain that you don't have,
I'd have one dollar. - Squidward to SpongeBob
_______________________________________________
Redhat-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
