[TAG] Setting up the mail subsystem in Linux

[Benjamin A. Okopnik]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2006 at 06:17:46AM +0100, Neil Youngman wrote:
> On or around Thursday 10 August 2006 19:57, Claude S. Sutton reorganised a 
> bunch of electrons to form the message:
> 
> > So that is my first question.  How do I get Thunderbird and fetchmail
> > hooked up?
> 
> Now that is interesting. Fetchmail pulls the mail into a mailbox 
> in /var/spool/mail. Thunderbird appears not to support that, but no doubt 
> someone will tell me I'm wrong. I'm using kmail which as no problem with 
> that.

Thunderbird, as I understand it, does its own POP and SMTP and does not
use external systems. Some people retrieve their mail to a local spool,
then run their own POP server and pull mail from _that_ with
Thunderbird; this can be useful for a home LAN, but I see it as clumsy
and overkill for a single machine.
 
> > The second question is:  How do I set up smtp with what I have on my
> > machine?  I do not have exim on my system although it is available
> > through the standard Ubuntu source list.
> 
> I wouldn't set up SMTP on your local machine unless you have a good reason for 
> doing so. Your ISP should do all that stuff for you and email sent from a 
> dynamically allocated address is likely to be blocked by other ISPs as 
> potentially being SPAM. 

Strongly agreed. I'm a big fan of having your own mail subsystem, just
as I described in that article, but unless you run your own DNS and have
a valid Internet domain name, you're in for a world of grief. Let your
ISP, or email provider, deal with the mechanics of SMTP; you should
avoid it unless you're ready to devote a couple of months of serious
study to setting up a fully-functional Internet node (and pay the
associated costs.)


* Ben Okopnik * Editor-in-Chief, Linux Gazette * http://linuxgazette.net *