Thanks George, I nearly got exim to work. But after waisting another 6 hours I do not know how further.
I can now receive messages from the ISP into the /var/spool/exim/input directory and read them there with emacs. Mail rarely gets through to /var/spool/mail/jhspies and when that happens, I cannot tell why the next does not do the same. Nothing was received by procmail although there was a ~/.forward file. Sometimes it seems as if exim just sends the mail back to the ISP to be received again when I dial up again. I do not understand all the questions of the configuration script and do not know what to answer. After two years of using linux it seems to become more user unfriendly as far as setting up mail is concerned. My .fetchmailrc also have to change for exim but I do not know how. At one stage the following setting seemed to work, but not in all cases: poll alpha.futurenet.co.za protocol pop3: no dns user jhspies \ password "xxxxxx" # smtphost localhost mda "exim -bm %s" I had to uninstall exim and reinstall smail to send this mail. Isn't there a howto on how to set up a single pc with a dialup connection to an ISP using exim, fetchmail and procmail? I know I do not need procmail if I use exim, but then I have to understand how exim works and I cannot get it working for a basic system. Sorry if I sound a bit grumpy, but I am a bit frustrated. The reason why I wanted to try out exim was because I get problems with a "Sender" field when I use smail. Some mail servers reject my mail as the following message illustrates (irrelevant lines removed): ---------------------------- |------------------------- Failed addresses follow: ---------------------| <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ... transport smtp: 550 relaying mail to narga.sun.ac.za is not allowed |------------------------- Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ -------------------------------------------------------------------- I have tried to prevent that by the following in my /etc/smail/transports: smtp: driver=tcpsmtp, max_addrs=100, # limit on number of addresses -max_chars, inet, # use route-addr addresses for routing remove_header="Sender"; use_bind, # resolve MX and multiple A records defer_no_connect, # try again if the nameserver is down -local_mx_okay, # fail an MX to the local host defnames # use standard domain searching but that obviously did not work. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | Johann Spies Windsorlaan 19 | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] 3201 Pietermaritzburg | | Tel/Faks Nr. +27 331-46-1310 Suid-Afrika (South Africa) | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me." John 14:1