names for devices and can I make mutt receive and send mail without exim?

[Thomas Stivers]

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On Fri, Jul 16 2004 at 05:13:43PM -0700, Sean M McMahon wrote:
> My cd rom I think is /cdrom, my root partician and all below it is / in 
> the harddrive, but how do I save something to my floppy drive?  The second 
> question is because I want to either  get rid of my mta altogether or have 
> it only wory about local mail.  If anyone knows of a good mutt tutorial on 
> how to make it work with pop without using exim, which it's doing now, or 
> of a better mailer which will do this, let me know.  I figure I don't 
> really need an mta because I am the user and I'd like to avoid the 
> security risk.  Sean

Your cdrom is almost certainly not /cdrom, but is more likely mounted
there. The actual reference to the device is more likely /dev/hdc,
/dev/cdrom, /dev/cdrom0, or some such. The filesystem on this device can
be mounted on /cdrom. I say all that to say that you will need to mount
your floppy to access it. Your floppy device is probably /dev/fd0 and
you can mount it on /floppy. If a directory called /floppy doesn't exist
you will need to create it with mkdir as root. You can mount the floppy
with the command:

mount /dev/fd0 /floppy

Now the files on the floppy will all be available in the /floppy
directory. If there is a line for your floppy drive in the /etc/fstab
file you can probably shorten the command above to "mount /floppy". An
important thing to remember is that you need to unmount the floppy
before removing it to make sure that all changes have been written to
the disk.

There are other options for an MTA than exim and the other real MTA's
which you can use just to send mail from local programs to your ISP's
smtp server. I don't know which ones are packaged and which ones aren't,
but there are ssmtp, nullmailer, bsmtp, and probably more I don't know
about. This will only take care of sending mail, receiving mail with a
pop server can be handled by mutt directly, but it is really much easier
to get your MTA working locally at least and using a mail retrieval
agent like getmail or fetchmail to get your messages from the pop
server. The mutt designers believe strongly in the one tool for one task
ideal and designed mutt to only show you your mail and do that well. If
you really want one program that will handle all of the parts of the
mail process then pine is what you want. Though when you get tired of
using pine the mutt community will be happy to have you back *smile*. 

- -- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan

Thomas Stivers	e-mail: stivers_t at tomass.dyndns.org
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