Hello, Just one minor comment, since others seem to be handling the query...
> Mark Phillips wrote: ... > > 3. Fetchmail feeds this email into some black box (I don't understand > > this bit - is it a file or is it a program that is sitting around > > waiting for such events???). ... > There is no black box. Fetchmail communicates directly with exim thru > port 25 using the SMTP protocol. Actually, there's another way you can hand a message to exim, and that is by invoking it directly, as /usr/sbin/exim (or /usr/sbin/sendmail). You can configure fetchmail to use either method. BTW, you might need to configure exim to accept invalid sender addresses from fetchmail, but I've forgotten how I did that. > > 5. I then decide to send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] I compose an > > email in pine which puts the message in the "black box" talked about > > above. ... > As above, pine will communicate directly with port 25 or your local > machine and talk to exim. I would suspect that most programs would call /usr/sbin/sendmail, because that's a lot easier to do. Certainly elm has that filename hard-coded into it, and so does mutt. /usr/sbin/sendmail is another name for exim, which then does whatever it's supposed to with the message - typically, it'll either write it to someone's mailbox, telnet 25 to another host, or write it into its private area to deal with it later. HTH Jiri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>