On 07/09/01 02:31:03 -0700, Paul Mackinney wrote:
> Hi! This is a little long-winded, so bail now if you're not interested
> in newbie mail setup woes...

I hope you can make some sense out of my reply. It's a little "all
over the place". The bulk of my reply is at the bottom...

> 
> I'm yet another person who'd love to completely transition from Windows
> to Linux. And yes, I use Outlook and yes, getting mail really working on
> Linux is the biggest obstacle to my completing the transition.

Yeah, mail is pretty important. I'm in the process of documenting my
mail setup experience to share with others.

> 
> I like Mutt. I'm willing to learn it. There've been very cool posts to
> this list about customizing it. But despite reading the fetchmail man
> pages and the relevant sections of Running Linux, the Network
> Administrator's Guide, and Linux in a Nutshell, I'm still confused.
> Here's what I'm trying to do, advice on both stategy and technique is
> appreciated:
> 
> Task 1. While logged in to my debian system as 'paul', get my @Home mail
> and send all outgoing mail through @Home's smtp server with
> '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' as the return address. As I understand it, I
> should be able to do this without just fechtmail and mutt.

Do you mean "with" or "without"? I'm a little confused. Mutt has some
option to change the from header for outbound mail. I don't use it, so
I can't pin it down for you. Fetchmail is used to fetch mail. It
doesn't send mail. 

> 
> Progress: I've successfully set up a .netrc file in my home directory to
> handle the username & password. My.fetchmailrc file is:
> 
> poll mail.xxx.yyy.home.com proto pop3 user "pmackinney" is "paul"

That looks okay to me.

> 
> and I invoke fetchmail with just the -k argument (because I'm testing).
> But outbound mail doesn't get sent.

Try it with the -vvv option too so you can see any errors that might
pop up.

> 
> Task 2. Use exim to forward all administrative and local mail to user
> 'paul', to a mailbox that mutt can access. This is not working at all,
> I've run eximconfig trying each of the 6 default options. As near as I
> can figure, the only domain I should really have to set in the exim
> config file is localhost, and make sure that the alias file points
> everything to 'paul'. But it ain't working.
> 
> Once the two above tasks are accomplished, I'll get to work on
> customizing mutt, use procmail to sort incoming mail into different
> mailboxes, and configure exim/mutt so that messages sent to the local
> system get sent with the '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' return address. But these 2
> tasks essential for me to feel comfortable in migrating my email from
> Windows.
> 

I have a very similar, if not identical setup as you. 

The first thing I did was get exim configured. You need to run
eximconfig.  I selected option 2 and then proceeded through all the
questions. I accepted the defaults with the exception of the smtp host
which I set to mail.xxx.yyy.home.com and sending the postmaster and
root mail to my user account. 

You then might want to take a look at the exim.conf file and make sure
the your local_domains has localhost and your hostname listed. Also,
look for trusted_users and add your local account name there. Mine
looks like this:

  trusted_users = mail:mwagnon

This apparently will make it easier on your Outlook using friends when
replying to you ;-)

After that, you're going to need to get the rewriting stuff taken care
of. Look at the REWRITE CONFIGURATION at the end of the exim.conf
file. You set up those aliases in /etc/email-addresses.

Assuming you're able to get mail without any problems with fetchmail,
you're almost set. For me, procmail is a pain. I use a .forward file
in my home directory to filter mail. Here's a snippet of mine:


  #   Exim filter   <<== do not edit or remove this line!
  if error_message then finish endif

  elif $h_Resent-From: contains "debian-user"
    then save $home/Mail/IN.Debian-User

  else save $home/Mail/Inbox

  endif

You might want to check the filter.txt.gz file in /usr/share/doc/exim
for more info on this.

If you can compare my recommendations to what you did and get back to
the list, we can get a better jump on setting your mail system up.

Good luck!
-- 
Mark Wagnon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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