sendmail/courier setup, incompatibility with pine

[Fraser Campbell]

On November 18, 2003 11:00 pm, Max Blanco wrote:

> OK, I had courier installed, not sendmail.  Sendmail was a leftove binary,

Most (all I think) emails servers provide a sendmail binary for compatibility 
reasons.

> I think.  Anyhow, your test worked.  It sets up a file called "~/Maildir"
> and dumps the text in there, but I did a "pine -F Maildir" and the mail
> was not in a pine-readable format.

There are different formats formats for mail storage.  Maildir storage 
involves several subdirectories and every email being stored in an individual 
file.   The more traditional mail format is mbox where all email is stored in 
one file.  There are advantages and disadvantages to either storage format.

courier and qmail mail servers use Maildir by default, other MTAs are capable 
of storing in Maildir either directly or through cooperation with procmail.

> I think all's well, except for the "Maildir" incompatibility with pine.
>
> Now if only I could fix that...

AFAIK pine needs a patch to be compatible with maildir.  Just go back to mutt 
it's a better mail reader anyway ;-)  In /etc/Muttrc there are a few 
parameters to tweak so that mutt will default to ~/Maildir/ ... mbox_type is 
one and spool_file (or similar) is another.  "man mutt", seach for Maildir, 
and you should be able to figure it out.

You could read the email using IMAP or POP, pine does support that.  Seems 
like overkill though for a locally accessible mail spool.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux

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