On Thu, February 2, 2017 10:37 pm, sunrise wrote:
> Thanks a lot for both replies; I feel I am now several steps closer to
> getting a working system. I already had getmail set up but didn't have
> msmtp installed.
The Mail Transfer Agent (on Debian, typically Exim4) handles outgoing
messages on the local machine; these messages are sent to the mail server
of your Internet Service Provider (ISP), which acts as a "smarthost".
If you configure Exim4 (and you should, using the configuration dialogue
provided by the Debian maintainer), you specify the URL of the smarthost
(such as "mail.myisp.net"), the address which is to appear on outgoing
messages ("myn...@myisp.net"), and the password which the smarthost
requires for authentication. For this, see the command "dpkg-reconfigure
exim4-config" and the files "/etc/email-addresses" and
"/etc/exim4/password-client".
> One question I still have is: What are the advantages of using getmail
> and msmtp versus using mutt's built in POP3 and SMTP capabilities?
The author and maintainer of getmail has taken great pains to ensure that
getmail4 works reliably even if a POP3 server is "broken" (and that often
is the case). With a properly-configured getmail, you pretty much are
assured of never losing a message. In salvaging messages from a POP3
server, I personally have used getmail4 to download hundreds of thousands
of messages in a single marathon session running in excess of a day.
And, as I previously mentioned, you can use the combination of getmail4
and maildrop to sort incoming messages in any manner and to any degree you
wish, triggering periodic fetches with a cron job, even if no mutt session
is running. And then, when you do start mutt, you can view any of the
sort categories independently of the others. Thus, if you are pressed for
time, you can look only at messages of important categories, without the
necessity of wading message-by-message through stuff which is not urgent.
Also, if you do not have 24/7 access to the Internet, delegating
downloading (and sorting, if desired) allows you to go on-line, get your
messages while you browse or do other on-line work, then go offline and
read the messages with mutt.
But those who are accustomed to the Window$ way of doing things may prefer
a monolithic mail client which can fetch directly from a POP3 server and
send directly to a smarthost.
RH
