[sllug-members]: Fetchmail localhost error

[Lamont Peterson]

On Thursday 22 March 2007 12:03pm, Jared Bernard wrote:
[snip]
> HOLY COW!! What have I gotten myself into. Let me see if I can get this
> straight.
> First I need a MTA (sendmail, postfix, exim, qmail, etc), which basically
> graps my emails from the server to my local system.

No, the MTA is your own mail server.  That's where you would have your email 
end up.

BTW, MTAs are not MDAs, though all MTAs come with a "generic" MDA for local 
delivery so that mail can be delivered (locally) without you having to go 
grab some other program too.

> Then I need a MUA 
> (fetchmail, etc) which 'processes' my emails on my local system

Yes, but not quite.  Fetchmail is a hybrid program.  It's primarilly an MSP 
(mail submission program) for pushing email to an MTA, but it's also just 
enough of an MUA to be able to "fetch" your mail from other mail accounts 
(those other systems consider the mail delivered to it's final destination) 
and then feed that to your configured MTA.

> and then 
> finally I need an email client (pine, mutt, etc) to read my emails.

Yes.  That would be the MUA (Mail User Agent).

> Is this right? What is the benefit of this type of set up, over just using
> thunderbird, evolution, kmail, which seems to have each of these qualities
> rolled up in one?

The reason to use fetchmail is to collect all your email from several other 
account and then put it all on your own mail server, together.  That way, you 
only have to configure your MUA(s) to connect to your one local server.  This 
can also be useful if you want to use IMAP, but (some or all of) your email 
accounts are delivered to servers that only support POP.

Programs like Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail, etc. are simply MUAs.  You could 
just connect them to each of your mail accounts and work with them that way.  
All your email would be accessed from within your one client, but the mails 
themselves would still be kept separately on the various accounts.

> Here is what I want to do and maybe I can get some suggestions as to the
> *easiest* way of going about it.

The easiest way of going about it is to use Thunderbird, Evolution, KMail or 
whatever.  If your completely brand new to running email server and brand new 
to fetchmail, that'll be way simpler.  But, hey, you wouldn't learn anything 
that way, right :) ?

> I want to use pine as my email client with 2 accounts (a csolutions account
> and gmail). I like pine and I don't 'get' mutt. I like the speed of the
> non-gui client, and it's my preference. Both accounts are POP3 but work off
> different ports (csolutions uses the standard 110, 25, while gmail uses
> 465, 995). I should mention both use ssl. My end ojective is to view and
> manage both accounts in pine. What is the easiest for a novice like me to
> set up and manage? How do I go about it or where do I find the information
> to set this up?

Actually, 25 is SMTP, 465 is SSL wrapped SMTP, 110 is POP, 995 is SSL wrapped 
POP, 143 is IMAP and 993 is SSL wrapped IMAP.  gmail is using the SSL wrapped 
versions, while csolutions (assuming your info was all correct there) is 
using TLS.

But, I thought that pine could do IMAP with TLS or SSL.  Am I wrong?

> I've tried to google this info, but there seems to be so many different
> ways, configurations, standards (IMAP, POP3) and applications (MTAs, MUAs,
> clients) out there that I can't seem to narrow down a solution to fit my
> situation. And everyone seems to have there own opinions about which is
> best. I guess this is the good and bad of Linux and OSS which is that there
> is so many ways to do things. That's why I use Linux for the freedom of
> choice that I have, but in this instances it seems like information
> overload and I know it's because I don't fully understand the technology of
> how email works. I just know what I have and what I want to do.

Here's what I would suggest:

1.  Install either Sendmail or Postfix (Exim sucks and I don't want a flame 
war here, QMail is right out for a new mail admin, so don't take that 
suggestion either).  I would recommend Postfix unless you are already 
intimately familiar with the bat book.  The default configuration of either 
Sendmail or Postfix in Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, SUSE, Ubuntu and Gentoo (I 
don't personally know this for sure for any other distros) will *NOT* listen 
on the outside interface.  Do not configure your firewall to block incoming 
TCP port 25, it should be "not" configured to accept incoming TCP port 25 (in 
other words, your firewall should block whatever isn't explicitly allowed, so 
don't add a rule to allow TCP 25).  Because they don't listen on anything but 
the loopback interface (i.e. localhost) your perfectly safe out of the box.

2.  Install fetchmail.  This will probably require a small bit of 
modifications to your MTA configuration so it will accept and deliver mail 
for your accounts when fetchmail feeds it in.

3.  Install pine.

4.  Log in as the user the email is being delivered to (as configured in 
fetchmail & your MTA).

5.  Run pine.

6.  To send mail, make sure you can connect to your SMTP servers for each of 
your accounts and that you can specify which account to use when composing 
messages.

That should do it.  HTH and good luck.
-- 
Lamont Peterson <lamont at gurulabs.com>
Senior Instructor
Guru Labs, L.C. [ http://www.GuruLabs.com/ ]

NOTE:  All messages from this email address should be digitally signed with my
       0xDC0DD409 GPG key. It is available on the pgp.mit.edu keyserver as
       well as other keyservers that sync with MIT's.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://sllug.org/pipermail/sllug-members/attachments/20070322/44081963/attachment.pgp