If you have a dial-up service to an ISP, and want to avoid excessive telephone charges for reading and composing mail while on line, you can set up your Linux system to collect and deliver mail automatically.
The first requirement is that you are able to connect to your ISP and disconnect by predefined commands, such as ppp-on and ppp-off. Without these, you cannot even get started!
The next requirement is a mail collection agent and a delivery agent. These programs do the work of transferring mail between your system and the ISP.
A good mail collection program is fetchmail, which is capable of talking to a mail server in any of five different protocols.
For a mail delivery agent, I use sendmail. This handles mail delivery both within my own system and from my system to the ISP.
The programs are put together into a script, which is run by cron. You can also run it "by hand", but you need to become superuser to do so.
The net result is that mail is collected and delivered without your ever having to
do anything more to achieve it.
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Last updated on 27th October 1996 by Oliver Elphick