Gentoo questions

[Jayson Smith]

Hi,
I was subscribed to the Gentoo-user mailing list where I got most of my
Gentoo issues resolved.  However, I got quite tired of coming to my computer
after a few hours only to have fifty or a hundred messages in my mailbox,
many of which were talking about things I had no interest in.  Yeah I know,
the delete key is your friend and all that, but it was still a pain to go
through.  So I'll ask a few questions here.
1.  I have switched from Exim to Postfix.  However, I didn't appear to get
the sample files Postfix mentions in its main.cf file.  How do you specify
that Postfix is to use your ISP's smtp server as a smarthost?
2.  Pop3.  I installed Qpopper, but aparently a necessary program,
/usr/sbin/popauth, is missing from the 4.0.5 package.  Has anybody gotten
pop3 working on Gentoo and if so how?  I've tried a few other pop3 daemons
but they all reject perfectly good username/password combinations.
3.  Epic4.  The Irc client.  On my old Debian system I could run it in dumb
mode and have a pretty good Irc experience.  However, the version which
Gentoo installed when I emerged it gives me the time and other numbers
before every line!  This is, as you can probably figure out, quite annoying
to say the least, when you have to listen to it!  Has anybody had this
experience and how do you fix it?
Thanks for any help.
Jayson.