Minimal skills

Fri Jun 5 00:08:04 UTC 2020

>I suggest using MailDir (derived from MH) which is the standard

today. THunderbird and many others use it. As you can configure

the path to local mailboxes, you can use them with several programs

in parallel.

I can configure thunderbird to cache mail in Maildir? Never heard of Maildir though. My original plan was to have fetchmail and postfix and imap program configured to work with mbox. mbox is just default MUA though and I can replace it with thunderbird which is MUA also. But if I want to use command line MUA like mutt do I still not need these programs to poll mail? What is the difference between cacheing mail in Maildir vs using mutt and polling mail however it is that you do so?  

Thanks for the formatting of the message. To explain why my messages are formatted this way, I'm trying to copy the format of these messages by adding  >  wherever there is a new paragraph and indentation. At first I thought this was all that proper bottom posting was. Now I see that most MUA 's have automatic formating. I'll check it out and see if I can enable these settings if they are not already.

>  
> On Jun 4, 2020 at 5:24 PM, Polytropon  <freebsd at edvax.de>  wrote:
>  
>  
>  Sidenote first: I have reformatted your reply. It has, for a reason I can not understand, the quoting characters ">  " only for the first line, but not on the subsequent ones, and the lines have an empty line in between. There is no header stating who you are quoting. Your lines do not conform to the "maximum line length" suggestion, but that's also not a problem as normal MUAs can deal with this just fine. I have also removed the remaining distorted message where all line breaks and spaces seem to have vanished... On Thu, 4 Jun 2020 16:47:54 -0600, Brandon helsley wrote:  >   >  If you have IMAP support, you can even try / use multiple MUAs and  >   >  see what works best for you, without requiring to have multiple  >   >  mail accounts and program-individual local mailboxes. You can even  >   >  use Thunderbird and alpine side by side, with Maildir local storage,  >   >  connecting to an IMAP account - all this is possible and does not  >   >  require complicated configurations.
  >   >  That's basically what I had wanted to do since I couldn't figure  >  postfix out withal the mail components. You don't need to run your own postfix installation for that; use can use the one that "hotmail.com" is providing - they have an IMAP interface.  >  What I am aspiring for is to set up all my three email addresses  >  in a local mailbox like mbox or whatever. I suggest using MailDir (derived from MH) which is the standard today. THunderbird and many others use it. As you can configure the path to local mailboxes, you can use them with several programs in parallel.  >  I still don't quite understand the components. It seems as though  >  with an mua you can set this up. Thunderbird is pretty easy to set up and configure properly. It can connect to IMAP accounts without any further tools, and it can cache messages in local mailboxes in MailDir format.  >  So then what is fetchmail and imap programs like dovecot for if  >  an MUA works for this. The MUA is the _user's_ s
ide of the whole thing - the program the user interacts with to read, write, and sort messages. In your case, it's the K-9 app on your Android phone. The fetchmail program obtains messages from your account using POP3 or IMAP and stores them in a local mailbox. It's a tool to "get your messages". For example, I use fetchmail to get my messages from my account and have them in local mailboxes. It's used to receive messages. I need something else to send messages - this is done by my MUA. (It incorporates new messages from the local mailbox filled by fetchmail.) But as I said, this is not needed (!), and maybe not even desired given the convenience and flexibility of IMAP (often built into the MUA). And dovecot is the counterpart for tools like fetchmail: it runs on the server fetchmail connects to. You have a typical client-server-setting here. In relation to mailing, you can make yourself familiar with the different acronyms, their  meaning, program examples, and what they do ("sends
 message to an incoming server", "puts message into a user's mailbox on the server", and so on).  >  Or can I only poll mail to a local mailbox in my directory tree  >  somewhere with MTA? With a MUA (NB: U!) like Thunderbird or alpine, this is done automatically when you have set up your account connection as IMAP and poll for new messages. You don't need to manually involve a MTA such as postfix here. The MTA is responsible for sending your message to the desired recipient. Mail handling involves a few more agents, I know, but I wanted to simplify this a bit, and I didn't even talk about spam filters, virus scanners, signing, certificates, trust and all the other things... ;-) You can find more information here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_agent_(infrastructure) The different components are covered here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_user_agent   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_submission_agent   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_transfer_agent   https://en.wikip
edia.org/wiki/Mail_delivery_agent   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail_retrieval_agent  Covered agents cannot be detected. ;-) What you should get running first is a MUA. Everything else is already handled by your provider "hotmail.com". -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since  4.0  Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... 
>  