398 lines
36 KiB
Plaintext
398 lines
36 KiB
Plaintext
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Episode: 1188
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Title: HPR1188: Rmail in Emacs
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1188/hpr1188.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-17 21:18:31
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---
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Hi everybody, this is Ken here with an update on the Sourna project. There's only 11 hours
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to go as I record this. There have been 235 funders so far. That's a massive increase
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on yesterday and they have contributed $8,633 of the $20,000. So that's a 43% goal. Bear
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in mind that regardless of what happens tomorrow, all that money will be going to the Sourna
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project. So this is quite important. Remember, last little push now folks, if you haven't
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donated, this is your chance to donate. Yes, it is. Even if it's only a small amount or
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a big amount, it's absolutely fine. But you can also definitely now help spread the
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word by passing this on to celebrities or popular people with large amount of followers
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and followers on Twitter, or on Facebook, or any of the other social networks that may
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be available to you. We accept cash from all donations, from all angles. In other news,
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Tlatu just uploaded a show yesterday, which is kind of good because I need to edit it anyway,
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to edit in this clip. And his last show was released on 2012-1127 and looking here at the
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Q and the last show, the host with the latest show is 2012-1219 and that was Charles N.J. So
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therefore, based on the new scheduling rules of the person who has not posted the show
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the longest, we'll get on to the top of the queue and that will be Tlatu today.
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Steer to the queue as it stands, there are 15 shows in the queue. Hooray! Unfortunately,
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those are only from four hosts. So we will be alternating shows between Ahuka and 5150
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over the coming period of time if people don't submit shows in the meantime. With the
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new queueing system, it is highly likely that your show will get bumped up to the top of
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the queue if you have not released the show since 2012-19 and then the other one is 2012-27
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and January 10th and January 22nd. So those are the short last show release dates for
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the good folks who have contributed a show. In other news, Haka Public Radio Community
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News is going to be on in 9 days, 22 hours, 6 minutes and 9 seconds at the time of recording
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this. I'm going to post the show and have a cup of Roy Busty. Feel free to join me.
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You're listening to Haka Public Radio Community News.
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You're listening to Haka Public Radio. Hi everyone, this is Klatu and in this episode
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I'm going to be talking about our mail, that is a letter R-M-A-I-L-R mail, which is an
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application that you can use within GNU EMAX to check your mail and to reply to it and
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delete it and all the other things that you would normally do with email. So I spoke about
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GNU EMAX a couple of episodes or quite a few episodes to go now and I spoke about it for
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a couple of episodes, specifically three. It was a three-part series. I think I might have
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snuck in something about Doc Book and Public in which spoke a lot about GNU EMAX. I don't think
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it was specifically an EMAX episode though, but I spoke about it back then and I probably mentioned,
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I imagine I don't know, I haven't really listened to those shows in a while, but I imagine I
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mentioned that I have been using EMAX a lot myself lately and that really hasn't slowed down.
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There are some days where I really do just kind of live in EMAX. So an application that handles
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email from within that operating environment is quite nice. It's very handy to have available,
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so you don't have to background EMAX and go out to mud or something like that. You can just stay
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within EMAX, you can check your incoming mail, you can write a quick message and send it off,
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little things like that. It's a small matter of convenience and it's kind of nice, so I thought
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I would cover it here because it's a neat application actually. So our mail, I think you might have
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access to it without EMAX as well, but I'm speaking very specifically about it from within EMAX
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because that's how I've been using it. The nice thing about our mail and mud and probably
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pine, although I have to admit I haven't used pine in this workflow that I'm about to tell you about,
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so I'm not sure, but certainly mud and our mail, they're just in UAVs, their mail user agents,
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they are not MDAs or MTAs, whatever the other ones are called, I think that might be it, but they're
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not mail transport agents, they're not mail delivery agents, they are simply the mail user agents,
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meaning that you can have one inbox file and you can use our mail and mud on it without any kind
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of conflict because they're not handling any kind of backend stuff like delivery and filtering
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and sorting and stuff like that. That's a powerful thing for flexibility because what it means is
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I can be SSH into a server and not in EMAX at all and check my mail in mud or if I'm SSH into
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that server and I'm living in EMAX that day, doing a lot of EMAX stuff like writing or coding or
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whatever, then I can again quickly check my email without ever having to kind of leave the environment
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that I have sort of up and running at that time. I could also send a quick message, delete some
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messages that I don't need anymore, all kinds of things with our mail, all from within EMAX. So it's
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it's a matter of flexibility for me and it's also a matter of interest for me because I'm kind of
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interested in eSpeak which is the voice enabled, the screen reader enabled EMAX hack that some
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blind user out there maintains and it's kind of nice because it creates an all-text environment
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for blind users and it reads everything off of their screen for them and it all kind of works
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through EMAX. So having an email application that you don't have to fire up from within eShell
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or something ridiculous like that is kind of nice. It's just all very integrated with the whole
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eSpeak, eList, EMAX kind of environment. So lots of different reasons to be interested in this
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for me and for you again it could be a matter of convenience if you are a new EMAX user. So before
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I get into the specifics of our mail which at the end of the day it's just a mail user agent if
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you've used one text-based user agent you've used them all sort of not really but anyway you get
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the idea, I mean it's a text-based mail user agent. It's a mail client that doesn't have a GUI,
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it just has you interact with it as you would with much or IRSSI for instance. You know lots of
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keyboard, centric shortcuts and things like that but the real trick I guess is understanding the
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back end of your e-mail system enough to set this thing up correctly. So here's how we could talk
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about that. I've covered this before in I think a GNU World Order episode which is my other show
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that I do at GNUWorldOrder.info. You should go subscribe I guess if you want but I'm going to talk
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about it a little bit again here because I feel like well number one I probably understand it
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better by now anyway and number two you might not go hunt down that episode. So here's how internet
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e-mail electronic e-mail rather works or electronic mail you know that what e-mail stands for. I'm
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assuming it does. So here's how it works. Well actually I'm bluffing I really don't know how it
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works but here's how I think it works. So there's a server on a computer like a server application
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and it's called send mail or you might be using something else but it would be something whose job
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it is to well send out some e-mail and so the way it does that is the way that everything else on
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the internet works you know I mean it looks for a domain it looks up the DNS entry for that and
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it figures out where to take this this message this text message it does that and it ends up
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somehow to your e-mail server whatever kind of e-mail server you have let's let's imagine right
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now that you're running your own because essentially if you're going to be doing a lot of terminal
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e-mail stuff on your computer you almost kind of have to think of yourself as an e-mail server or
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at least it helps me to think of myself as an e-mail server because that just it makes the back end
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make a lot more sense. So it ends up at your server your e-mail server it knocks on whatever port
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you have available for e-mail for incoming e-mail and once all the authentication stuff happens
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do you like how I just skip over that so there's authentication magic and then it delivers the email
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into the hands of something called a mail delivery agent so the thing that has been traveling
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towards your server up until this point has been the mail transport agent that's called the MTA
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and again that would be something like send mail or I think you mail things like that probably
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what is it dovcott I don't really know I've only used send mail myself so there they are they
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they're there that their job is to transport the email from one box to another box now once it's
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at the box it it it it authenticates it gets in and then it drops off the email into the hands
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of the mail delivery agent in d a delta in m d a the m d a would be a program like proc mail that's
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the really really sort of popular one that's almost almost ubiquitous I mean it's it's it's a big one
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proc mail and it is proc mail's job to receive e-mail and then kind of look at it and see where it's
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supposed to be placed on the system so for instance if you have one email address that is
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receiving e-mail and then it proc mail could could parse all the different messages and find out
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oh this one is to clad to this one is to gourd this one is to I don't know somebody else
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and and then it can distribute those to other other mailboxes so that's what proc mail does
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and you've probably heard of proc mail recipes and all the different rule sets that it has
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so it's a pretty complex and robust application and it comes with a couple of utilities I know I
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use four mail a lot so it's it's useful big it can get complex so that's proc mail and again the job
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of it is to sort the mail essentially it it it it it has received the mail and now it sprinkles
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it through the system to all the different eagerly awaiting e-mail box accounts that are on that
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server and after that's done the only thing left to do is for the user to look at the e-mail to
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read it to read and respond and all that other good stuff and those are of course the mail user
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agents the two that I guess I am most familiar with in the terminal are mut and our mail although I
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used to use pine a lot and did a hack-up of radio episode on it so if you're at all interested in
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pine then then do check that out so that's the setup right you've got mta getting the email from
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one server to another you have the mda distributing the email within your your email server and then
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you've got mua is looking at the email reading replying deleting sorting stuff like that the good
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news is that most Linux distributions at least in my experience so far already have the mta
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most commonly send mail could be something else but seeing a lot of send mail already configured
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you don't have to go in and and build that that's just something that that send mail kind of does
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and even if it's not already installed you can install it and it it's ready out of the box it
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knows how to send mail from your computer to some other place that's one third of this equation
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that that really you don't have to worry about so that's the good news the other news it's not
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bad news but the thing to keep in mind is that send mail as its name implies is a sending mechanism
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it sends email out from one server to another very few of us unless you really are running your own
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email server very few of us leave our computers with the email port open ready to receive anything
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that that knocks so on your own computer if you're going to use our mail or mutt for that matter
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or anything else you need some mechanism to kind of probe whatever middleman you use for your
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email so whether that is your ISP the email that they offer you or some some server that you
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that you have a vps slice on and they've configured an email server for you like the way some of
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the big web hosts do or whether it's a service like Gmail or I don't know probably Yahoo or whatever
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other email services are out there whatever that that thing is for you whatever wherever your address
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lives that's your that's your actual email server right so we want to go to that email server kind
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of knock on its door and authenticate and and see if there has been any email delivered to it
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meant for us and then we'll pull that down to our our local computer so again that's
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that's two different ideas there's there's one of a of an actual email server which of course
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its job is to receive email from another server so it's it's got that email port open listening
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ready to receive email your laptop or your home desktop it doesn't have that it's
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hopefully behind a firewall and and you probably don't really want to deal with running your own
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email server these days at least that's what everyone tells me haven't actually tried it myself
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but it seems to be a pretty popular model that you use some other email server where there are people
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paid to sort of filter out all the obligatory spam and all that of the good stuff and then you go
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and fetch your mail from that server and in fact that's exactly what you use to get your email
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from that server it's an application called fetch mail fetch mail is again a pretty simple
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little application to set up it's it's not really that scary it's it's a little bit um
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it it has its own syntax and it's an interesting syntax so for for fetch mail to work you you
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simply create a dot fetch mail RC file in your home directory and then you give it sort of a
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a little almost human readable kind of line you'll you'll hear it so it's it's poll P O L L
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space the domain that you want to get your email from so maybe it's um
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GNU world order dot info or actually it would probably be more likely it would be
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mail dot GNU world order dot info space with proto that's with and then space proto pr ot
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as a t o as in protocol space pop three in this case we're doing it with pop three colon user
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quote clatu at GNU world order dot info in quote there has password quote fubar close quote
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is clatu here and once mda quote slash user slash bin slash prock mail close quote okay so what
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on earth did I just say so that that's the line that's the configuration line and and as you can
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as you can hear it it is it sounds very human so you just kind of have to keep in mind the syntax
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so it's just pull the domain name with proto pop three in this case colon user and then whatever
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user name is on that server right so it's it's user fubar there has password fubar is clatu
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here so you're you're telling it what user it's almost like an SSH command it's you're telling
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log into this domain as this user even though I am such and such here now that might be the same
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on both servers I tend to use clatu on most of the servers that I joined but sometimes clatu is
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not available so I use not clatu and that becomes a little bit weird for me because then I do
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have different user names on different servers so in my case I might have user space quote not
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clatu at GNU world order dot info close quote or if you're if the mail server that you're using
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does not require or does not want the at domain name extension on the user name it might just be
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not clatu or it might be clatu so you have to define the user that you're logging in to your
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mail server as so user quote not clatu close quote there as an over there has password quote fubar
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close quote is clatu here and once mda user been prock mail so there we're just defining the
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password of the remote server we're saying hey all that corresponds to who you know as clatu
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here on this server and pass everything that you get all the mail that you fetch pass that on to
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the mda of in this case quote slash usr slash bin slash prock mail close quote and that does the exact
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function of going out to a server knocking on its port and authenticating with the password which
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yes is plain text here so you want to make sure and I think fetch mail won't even let you do it if
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it's not but you want to make sure that this file in your home directory is only readable by you no
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other group no other person should be able to read this this configuration file is it weird to
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have yours password and plain text in your own directory absolutely it's nuts I have no idea why
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there's not encryption on this it's really really bizarre it's also the only way I really know how
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to do this so fetch mail go out knock on the server authenticate copy over the email the new email
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there to your local computer destined for the user clatu and sending piping all of that email
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to some india some some program that will be able to then distribute all that email
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throughout the rest of your system okay so if we're using prock mail if you have prock mail on
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the system that you're configuring the the configuration isn't it doesn't have to be terribly
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difficult again it's a very very complex application potentially I mean it can be as complex as you
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want it to be but the the most basic kind of configuration is really only needs to be four lines
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and and it needs to be stored in your home directory in a file called dot prock mail rc and the
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four lines in mine for instance are path equals slash usr slash bin mail der equals dollar sign
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home slash mail so that's the directory that I want to store all of my mail in default equals
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dollar sign mail der that's the folder I just defined slash inbox so that's the default location
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where all those emails are going to get dumped into that's just a file inbox and then log file
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equals dollar sign mail der slash logs because I I guess we ought to have a log file so that's
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that's all that prock mail really needs to be it doesn't have to be fancier than that if you're
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the only user on your system getting email I have an account on a server where prock mail is not
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available to me it's it's not in it's it's it's somewhere in I think it is in usr slash bin
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but it's it's not something that I'm allowed to create recipes for I have no access to prock mail
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so there's another little application that you might want to check out if prock mail either
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is not available to you on your on whatever server you are doing this uh this stuff on
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or if prock mail just happens to be too maybe complex or something there's this handy little
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mail delivery module called t-mail that's t as in tom mail m-a-i-l t-mail delivers mail to
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users inbox or a designated folder possibly um I say possibly because it really depends on how
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the server is set up and what kind of privileges you have but uh t-mail is a nice little alternative
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lightweight or I call it lightweight I don't actually know it's like footprint but I do know that
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in terms of the simplicity of of setting it up it it it is kind of it's it's even easier than
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prock mail not the prock mail is necessarily difficult but but it is there's zero configuration
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practically so for instance on this particular server I might have a poll can you mail
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doctor new world order dot info with proto pop pop three colon user not class who there has past
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word fubar is clatu here and once mda quote slash usr slash slash pkg slash ben slash t-mail
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space clatu plus r-mail closed quote all that's doing is saying okay fetch mail once you've
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gotten all the email from whatever remote server I'm asking you to get mail from I want you to
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pass it on to the mda of t-mail and I give the exact path just in case and then I give it the user
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and the folder that I want it to deposit my mail into so in this case it's clatu and then the
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plus sign and then the word r-mail all in capital letters and the reason I chose that is because
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that's where r-mail wants to look automatically for local email is r-mail so that's my fetch mail
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and t-mail configuration on one of my other servers and that works really well so either way you
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want to set up proc you you want to set up fetch mail to go get your mail use your proper user name
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proper domain name obviously and the proper password for that remote server and then bring it in
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as your you for your username and dump it into some file probably in your home directory
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there are other ways to do it you could put it in some kind of system level directory but
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I don't think that makes much sense if you're if you're being this manual about the process you
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may as well make it all go to your home directory because that way it will travel with you it'll be
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portable and and you won't lose your configurations if you if you I don't know redo your system or
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something like that so t-mail or proc mail for your mda there's not again there's not a whole lot
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in in most cases there's not a whole lot that you need to do for either of those two programs
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you'd you'd really only need to delve deeper into proc mail or t-mail for that matter
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but really I think you'd want to go with proc mail for this but you'd you'd want to delve deeper into
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that if you do have a lot of different accounts that you're checking and you need them to be
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deposited into separate files or someone else's home folder stuff like that and that's
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way outside of the realm of this tutorial so at this point we've got all of our email fetched
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we've dealt with the delivery step proc mail or t-mail has placed it into some file and now
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there's a mail user agent out there just waiting to open up that file and parse it and and show it
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to you in a friendly kind of manner I mean understand and and maybe you ought to do this if you
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if you're this far along you may as well just do a less or a cat on on your inbox you know do it run
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fetch mail and you might want to do fetch mail space dash k so that keeps the email if you don't
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do the dash k it will erase the email and then if it doesn't know where if you've configured something
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|
wrong it won't know where to drop it off at like it won't if it can't find email it'll just it'll
|
||
|
|
still delete it off your remote server so fetch mail space dash k is a really good sort of safeguard
|
||
|
|
against deleting email that you might want to read someday without you know before you get everything
|
||
|
|
configured after you got it all configured you can discard the dash k and you can have you can
|
||
|
|
let fetch mail delete things as much as it wants to but at this point you've got a a file and you
|
||
|
|
again you can you can do a less on it you can actually see what it contains and it'll be ugly but
|
||
|
|
I mean in theory it's not in theory it is it is all of your email concatenated into one big file
|
||
|
|
and of course most user agents from what I understand kind of they look at the the front lines
|
||
|
|
and kind of separate the messages based on that and then of course they they can see most of
|
||
|
|
the header text from you this is why you don't see the the headings like x dash iran port dash
|
||
|
|
anti dash spam dash result received from this server and received message id date from you know all
|
||
|
|
of these different things that the header usually contains when you do like if you get spam and
|
||
|
|
you're curious and you go look at the headers that's what you do finally see but in general like
|
||
|
|
in real life when you're looking through your email you just see the from in the two maybe the cc
|
||
|
|
or the bc well not bcc well maybe the bcc if you're the bbcc person and then and then you see the
|
||
|
|
message so it makes it a lot friendlier and obviously it it makes it into it makes it look like
|
||
|
|
separate messages so that you don't have to go through and just literally delete chunks out of
|
||
|
|
like this one file which in theory you could do all of these things but I don't know why you would
|
||
|
|
know you'd much rather open emax and then launch our mail so you open up emax and you can do a meta
|
||
|
|
x or alt x or escape x whatever gets you into the mini buffer to issue some command meta x is what
|
||
|
|
I usually use and then type in our mail that is again the letter r m a i l all lowercase that launches
|
||
|
|
the interface for our mail there's some r mail stuff that you can actually do without launching
|
||
|
|
that interface but let's let's do it this way first so within our mail immediately looks for
|
||
|
|
a file called our mail all capitals located in your home directory if that does not exist
|
||
|
|
then it will look to your mail school the default mail school on your system which is the same
|
||
|
|
location that when you just type in mail or mail x on the terminal that's what that's looking at
|
||
|
|
your mail school this may or may not be something that you actually want to look at in our mail
|
||
|
|
I know that my mail school on a lot of my systems are things like emails from cron jobs and stuff
|
||
|
|
like that they're not things that I actually think of for myself as email our mail can be directed
|
||
|
|
to some other location if you hit meta x our mail dash input I think it is let me test it but
|
||
|
|
pre sure that's where it is inputs yeah our mail dash input and then hit return then it'll ask you
|
||
|
|
okay well what what file do I want do you want me to look at this is very similar to mud
|
||
|
|
and and this is why I like them both because they don't really care what they're looking at they
|
||
|
|
don't they're they're not like for instance thunderbird or or cameail nothing against either
|
||
|
|
those two applications I use those on separate systems as well but they don't they don't create
|
||
|
|
like a little folder and and have all your messages kind of organized in that folder and in order
|
||
|
|
to get it to a different email application you have to figure out how to export it out of out of
|
||
|
|
that client and then import it into the next client not like that it's it's it's a big file with a
|
||
|
|
bunch of emails concatenated together into it and then you launch your user agent and it looks
|
||
|
|
at the file it parses it and it gives it back to you and a user friendly format I really like that
|
||
|
|
I mean I don't know how I feel about these huge files with all these messages concatenated into
|
||
|
|
it I I guess in a perfect world somehow I could have a directory with a bunch of files each
|
||
|
|
representing one message and they'd all somehow magically have a really nice user friendly name
|
||
|
|
associated with them rather than random letters and numbers but whatever the point is that that
|
||
|
|
there's a there's a high level of modularity here so you can point our mail at any file that
|
||
|
|
contains a bunch of emails concatenated together it will parse it again I think it's based on the
|
||
|
|
from line I could be wrong about that I could be mixing that up a little bit but but it it
|
||
|
|
parses it for you it makes it look friendly it if you're in emacs which you are but if you're
|
||
|
|
in a terminal that that supports antsy colors then you get all different kinds of colors and shades
|
||
|
|
and things like that so that it sort of stands out you know the subject line is blue or the the
|
||
|
|
heading is is blue the text is green highlighted the the normal text is white the commented you know
|
||
|
|
the previous messages in the thread are red it it it looks good it's easy to read it makes it very
|
||
|
|
kind of user friendly in the very traditional sense of yes this is actually useful for the user
|
||
|
|
so that's our mail looking at your email you can go to the next message with uh alt in or
|
||
|
|
alt p for previous or I guess you call it meta I'm calling it alt right now alt p for previous alt
|
||
|
|
in for next that works you can jump to the first message with the I think it's the the less
|
||
|
|
than sign and the last one with the greater than sign and you can hit keys like r for reply or d
|
||
|
|
for delete or x for x-punge lots of very quickly accessible and pretty memorable keyboard shortcuts
|
||
|
|
and again this is all within emax so if you do hit r it brings up a new buffer with the two and the
|
||
|
|
from and the cc and stuff like that already filled out based on the contents of the of the message
|
||
|
|
that you just read that you're applying to it gives you a blank line or it gives you a commented
|
||
|
|
line telling you where to start typing your message you type some some things and then you hit
|
||
|
|
control c control c to send it and it sends the message so the question is how does it send that
|
||
|
|
message well the answer of course is through send mail probably that's if if that's what's on
|
||
|
|
your system and it frequently is um and and that's kind of the nice part that's the nice one of the
|
||
|
|
nice things about this it just uses your standard send mail settings for this computer now that's
|
||
|
|
nice if you're on a box that has all that stuff configured correctly that might not work so well
|
||
|
|
if you are not on a box that has all that configured correctly so again i i did say earlier that
|
||
|
|
you usually don't have to configure send mail and and that's true strictly speaking but
|
||
|
|
the the problem may arise that your is p probably doesn't want to see email coming straight
|
||
|
|
off of your box right they they don't like it when we send email straight from our computers
|
||
|
|
sometimes they they certainly not to some random server they want to you you you probably have
|
||
|
|
to go through an smtp server in order to get your email out into the world otherwise it'll probably
|
||
|
|
be blocked because it's going to look like spam to a lot of a lot of email servers and that's just
|
||
|
|
kind of a side effect of the spammy world we live in so the workaround for that that i found when
|
||
|
|
i was doing when i was configuring mutt for the first time was called is called m smtp so m smtp
|
||
|
|
is a mail transport agent very much like send mail but instead of actually sending it to a destination
|
||
|
|
it sends it to as you could guess an smtp server again the the configuration for m smtp is not
|
||
|
|
terribly difficult it it can be interesting if you're if you're i mean depending on
|
||
|
|
how your server is configured the one that you're sending email to so for me i'd like to use SSL
|
||
|
|
when i can so i my m smtprc file in my home folder consists of defaults tls space on
|
||
|
|
tls underscore trust underscore file space home clatu mail thought premium server ca.pem log file
|
||
|
|
space till the slash dot m smtp dot log and that's just to get SSL working this can be found online your
|
||
|
|
the the the thought premium server certificates you can find that online at thought actually they
|
||
|
|
they they make all of their certificates available for download so if you download them and put
|
||
|
|
them in some place in your system your system may also already have them but if not you can
|
||
|
|
download them i downloaded it and stashed it in my mail directory and then point the tls trust
|
||
|
|
file to that then then i mean if your server recognizes that then then that will be the the ssl
|
||
|
|
certification that you need to get that sort of working okay so that was just for ssl then the
|
||
|
|
rest of the stuff is a fairly traditional looking um configuration files it's account space i
|
||
|
|
don't know new world order that's just a human readable that's the name of this account from clatu
|
||
|
|
at new world order dot info so that's what you're setting your from line to post smtp dot
|
||
|
|
new world order dot info for instance it might not be that for you well it actually definitely
|
||
|
|
won't be that for you but you know it may be smtp out dot secure server dot net for instance i
|
||
|
|
i have a an account with go daddy that uses that i think or i did at one point um smtp or sometimes
|
||
|
|
it's i don't know it can be anything you have to look you have to look on your your your host
|
||
|
|
settings and see what their smtp server is that they want you to send stuff to port space
|
||
|
|
five eight seven maybe or nine nine five or whatever the ports are these days that people are using
|
||
|
|
for tls or ssl uh what's the other one four six five or something i don't know user space
|
||
|
|
again this is the the user account that that smtp server knows you as so in my case it might be
|
||
|
|
not clatu at new world order dot info or it might just be not clatu or it might just be clatu
|
||
|
|
it really depends on again what that server is configured to to accept as your username makes sense
|
||
|
|
right and it's funny because they're all a little bit different where they they can be different
|
||
|
|
so you you kind of need to know what those settings are do they want you to give your full account name
|
||
|
|
do they just want your username how is it set up authentication type i have it off space plane
|
||
|
|
and then the password through bar and then the account default that i the default
|
||
|
|
thing that i want smtp to always use is the new world order account because it's actually the only
|
||
|
|
account i have on here so um so you i mean just look at what your server accepts as the
|
||
|
|
different authentication methods and and it will tell you how to kind of configure your s your
|
||
|
|
ms mtp rc file create one of those put it in your home folder dot ms mtp rc and again make sure
|
||
|
|
that no one can read it but yourself because it does have your password in there in plain text
|
||
|
|
really strange and then when you the first time you send an email from rmail you will be asked
|
||
|
|
how do you want me to send this and you'll have three different options one will be to use your
|
||
|
|
default transport agent that would use send mail which again depending on your setup may or
|
||
|
|
may not be correct you might want it to use send mail if it can it will and it will go very smoothly
|
||
|
|
because your server already has send mail already configured and it's going to work if you have
|
||
|
|
no such if you if you if you don't have something set in place like for smtp and stuff like that on
|
||
|
|
that server then that's not going to work for you if it's not an email server it's probably not
|
||
|
|
going to work for you it might for a while but in my experience it gets flagged as spam eventually so
|
||
|
|
go through your your smtp server that'll be I think the I'm working off of memory at this point
|
||
|
|
because it's not in front of me so I think it's a second option is that you can
|
||
|
|
use some other program and in this case in that case you would want to define for our mail yes
|
||
|
|
use slash usr slash pkg slash bin slash smtp or whatever the path of smtp is and that way it will
|
||
|
|
or m smtp and that way it'll look for that program and it'll run that instead of send mail so m smtp
|
||
|
|
becomes your transport agent off of that box to an smtp server and then send mail or whatever they
|
||
|
|
use qmail whatever kicks in and and make sure that email gets from their box from their email
|
||
|
|
server to some other email server and then there's a third option and I don't remember what it is it
|
||
|
|
might be something like post-pone and just deal with it later I'm not I don't remember but that's
|
||
|
|
the easy way to set your your mail transport agent in our mail just make sure that you have
|
||
|
|
or or at some point make sure that you have m smtp rc configured or existing and configured
|
||
|
|
correctly so that you can use your isp's in the smtp server or your web host whatever you're using
|
||
|
|
okay that's sort of it for this stuff actually um not quite though so a couple of other things
|
||
|
|
that you're probably going to encounter are the desire to just send an email maybe you don't
|
||
|
|
want to go into our mail maybe you don't need to see your inbox all you want to do is send an email
|
||
|
|
well happily that's really really simple from within emax you can just hit control x and then the
|
||
|
|
letter m as in mail and it will create an empty email message for you in in a new buffer you can
|
||
|
|
send it to someone you can put a subject in there in a front line and some text and then again
|
||
|
|
just control c control c and it sends that message to whoever you've defined as the recipient
|
||
|
|
so that's really handy as well again there's just really fewer and fewer reasons to ever leave
|
||
|
|
emax the more you start using the features that it has to offer and there are many but even more
|
||
|
|
than just the convenience of having everything in emax like writing and checking email if that's
|
||
|
|
a concern for you even more than that for for people who maybe wouldn't use our mail as much
|
||
|
|
getting used to the whole system of of send mail or m smtq and proc mail or t-mail and these kinds
|
||
|
|
of these unix tools that make email work getting used to that really does help when you start wanting
|
||
|
|
to to flex your your email capabilities a little bit maybe make it a little bit more modular or
|
||
|
|
maybe use a server that you have some access to but not all the access that you would normally want
|
||
|
|
you can still use some of these tools because a lot of these are very kind of user centric things
|
||
|
|
that don't really affect the the server itself or that you know it doesn't it doesn't muck around
|
||
|
|
with the the server's email settings but it still can take advantage of the ability to go out
|
||
|
|
and check mail with fetch with fetch mail bring it into your home directory and then distribute it
|
||
|
|
and parse it so it can be handy for for a lot of different reasons and it just so happens that
|
||
|
|
our mail in new emax can be part of that workflow if you want it to be so hopefully this has helped
|
||
|
|
you understand email and our mail and some of the options that are available to you on on really
|
||
|
|
any Linux or unix system thank you very much for listening
|
||
|
|
you have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.org we are a community
|
||
|
|
podcast network that releases shows every weekday Monday through Friday today's show like all our
|
||
|
|
shows was contributed by a HPR listener like yourself if you ever considered recording a podcast
|
||
|
|
then visit our website to find out how easy it really is Hacker Public Radio was founded by the
|
||
|
|
digital dot-pound and the infonomicum computer cloud HPR is funded by the binary revolution
|
||
|
|
at binref.com all binref projects are crowd sponsored by linear pages from shared hosting to
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||
|
|
custom private clouds go to lunar pages.com for all your hosting needs unless otherwise stasis
|
||
|
|
today's show is released under a creative commons attribution share a line lead us our license
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