[Techtalk] newbie mail question

[Hamster]

On Thu, 13 Nov 2003 19:25:03 +0700
alice <RobinHood42 at clickta.com> wrote:

> I'm a little bit confused about my mail.

It can be quite a confusing topic, because its one of those things that can
be set up in about 13 million different ways.

There are two ways that appear to  be most common.

1. You use fetchmail to deliver mail to /var/spool and you set your email
reader (kmail etc) to pull mail from that spool. You use sendmail (or
equivalent) to deliver outgoing mail.

OR

2. You dont have any sendmail/fetchmail business going on at all. You use
your email client (kmail or whatever) to talk directly to your ISPs email
server, using either the pop protocol or imap protocol to download your
email from the ISP server, which saves it (usually) to somewhere in $HOME.
Usually, once pop has retrieved the email, it gets deleted off the ISP's
server because it is now stored locally on your computer.

So depending on how you've got things set up, it could explain why one
email programme is seeing it all, and another only seeing bits.

Hamster