How to setup email on Lab Linux PCs

This doc will show you how to set up sending and receiving email on linux PCs at Wilson lab.

Receiving Email

The "inc" program that comes with "mh" is supposed to allow downloading email from a popserver (ala "inc -host pop.lns.cornell.edu", but the version I have doesn't understand "qpop".

To get around that limitation, I use a program called "popclient" which allows me to retrieve email from the pop server pop.lns.cornell.edu (=lns598) and puts it in my local maildrop. From then on retrieving email is the same as on other unix machines.

Here are the configurations steps:

  1. You can find "popclient" at /home/mkl/stm/popclient-3.0.tar.gz. Untar it and run ./configure; make; make install

  2. Then you need to make yourself a ~/.poprc file which contains your stanza of pop server, account, password and other settings. Set the server to pop.lns.cornell.edusample.poprc".

  3. To retrieve email, you have to run "popclient pop.lns.cornell.edu" manually. This will retreive the messages from the server via "qpop" and place them in your mail drop (e.g. "/var/spool/mqueue/mkl"). Then running "inc" or doing the same in exmh will retrieve the email.

  4. I automated the manual step by writing a crontab script, which runs every 5 minutes:
    
    # min hour day month day-of-week command
    #-----------------------------------------------------------------
    # at 3am every day, tar up the cleo3 repository and save to lnsuf1 disk
    */5 * * * * /home/mkl/bin/pop_mail_allthetime
    
    
    with script "pop_mail_allthetime":
    
    #!/bin/bash
    PATH=/usr/local/bin:$HOME/bin:$PATH:
    popclient pop.lns.cornell.edu >/dev/null 2>&1
    
    
    (Don't forget to make that script executable!)

Sending Email

Sending email requires some kind of mail transport program, e.g. sendmail. But you don't have to have sendmail running locally. The file /usr/lib/mh/mtstailor has to be changed to point to a server that does:

mmdfldir:       /var/spool/mail
mmdflfil:       
uucpldir:       /var/spool/mail
uucplfil:       
mmdelim1:       \001\001\001\001\n
mmdelim2:       \001\001\001\001\n
mmailid:        0
umincproc:
lockldir:

hostable:       /usr/lib/mh/hosts
servers:        lns598.lns.cornell.edu

That's all folks. Let me know of problems.


Martin Lohner <mkl@lns.cornell. edu>
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