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| Revision History | ||
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| Revision 1.0 | December, 2009 | tmb |
| First Release | ||
Table of Contents
There are two fundamentally different ways to approach viewing your e-mail. One mode is live viewing and the other mode is offline viewing. Offline viewing requires more configuration and software but provides more functionality than live viewing, so there is a trade off.
This guide will cover how to configure both methods of reading e-mail. At the end of this guide you will be able to read both Groupwise and Mix e-mail.
In addition, this guide will cover how to configure your mail client to use the WVU SMTP server for sending mail using your MasterID account.
Throughout this document you'll see the following variables and terms. They're meant to be replaced with the value that is appropriate for your account.
Terms
-
GW-NAME This is your groupwise account name. For example, I would replace
GW-NAME-
MIX-NAME This is your mix account name. For example, I would replace
MIX-NAME-
MASTERID This is your MasterID Account name. For example, I would replace
MASTERID- Mail Reader/Client
Either pine or alpine, whichever you prefer.
- MTA
Mail Transfer Agent, this is the software responsible for the actual transfer of e-mail from one computer to another.
- MDA
Mail Delivery Agent, this is the software responsible for delivering any mail the MTA fetched to each users local inbox.
For live viewing the only software this guide requires the user to have is a mail client. This guide will use Alpine as the mail client. (Pine also works as they are functionally equivalent)
Offline reading requires two additional pieces of software, a Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) and a Mail Delivery Agent (MDA). This guide will discuss how to use Fetchmail as a Mail Transfer Agent to retrieve mail from the server, and Procmail to take the retrieved mail and put it into your local inbox.
Begin by launching your mail reader (Pine or Alpine). You can safely move past any greeting screens by pressing the Return Key. At the main menu press S to continue to the first settings page, and then press C to continue to the advanced settings page.
About 4 lines down is a field labeled
inbox-path, press the down arrow until it's
selected then press the Return key to select it. You will be
asked for two values, the first is Name of the
Inbox Server, followed by
Folder on .... to use for
INBOX.
Values For Groupwise:
Name: gwpop.wvu.edu/user="GW-NAME
For example, I would use the following for the Inbox Server Name
(leaving Folder as "inbox"): gwpop.wvu.edu/user="tibielawa"
Values For Mix:
Name: mix.wvu.edu/user="MIX-NAME
For example, I would use the following for the Inbox Server Name
(leaving Folder as "inbox"): mix.wvu.edu/user="tbielawa"
Now press E then Y to save your changes. Press Q then Y to quit your mail reader. If you relaunch your mail reader you will eventually be prompted to authenticate to your chosen server. If successful can can proceed to your inbox by pressing I.
Offline viewing is a manual process, you must fetch your mail before you can view any new mail in your mail client. The advantage to using offline viewing is that your mail is stored locally and is much faster to browse. If you ever wish to view old mail you may at any time regardless of Internet connectivity.
We'll begin setting up offline viewing by configuring the Mail Transfer Agent. Once again: the Mail Transfer Agent is responsible for two tasks. The first of which is handling authentication with your mail server, the second is downloading mail from your mail server. We will use fetchmail as our Mail Transfer Agent.
To begin configuring fetchmail we must create a
.fetchmailrc file in our home directory
and give it the proper permissions. If one already exists I
recommend renaming it so that we can begin fresh. Execute the
following two commands to begin:
touch ~/.fetchmailrc chmod 700 ~/.fetchmailrc
![[Important]](icons/important.png){kind=icon} | Important |
|---|---|
Fetchmail will refuse to run if the permissions are incorect on this file. |
Now, open the .fetchmailrc file for
editing and place either or both of the following two lines
into it.
Example 1. Fetchmail values for Groupwise
poll gwpop.wvu.edu protocol imap username GW-NAME
For example, I would use this line: poll gwpop.wvu.edu
protocol imap username tibielawa ssl keep mda "procmail -f
%F"
Example 2. Fetchmail values for MIX
poll mix.wvu.edu protocol imap username MIX-NAME
For example, I would use this line: poll mix.wvu.edu
protocol imap username tbielawa keep mda "procmail -f
%F"
Now that our MTA is configured we can configure our Mail
Delivery Agent (MDA). The MDA is responsible for taking mail
from fetchmail and delivering it to your inbox. We will use
Procmail as our MDA in this guide
and store all of our mail in a folder called mail in our home directory.
Begin by creating a file .procmailrc in
your home directory. Now open this file for editing. Place the
following block into your .procmailrc
file.
Example 3. Procmail Configuration File
SHELL = /bin/sh
PATH=$HOME/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
MAILDIR=$HOME/mail #This folder ("mail") must exist!
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR/INBOX #This is the file your mail will be stored in
LOGFILE=$HOME/.procmail.log #Errors will be logged here
LOCKTIMEOUT=60
VERBOSE=1
:0:
INBOX
Finish by creating a folder called mail. When procmail receives mail
from fetchmail it will be stored in a file called
INBOX in the folder called mail.
Now that we have fetchmail and procmail configured correctly the only step that remains is fetching our actual mail. Just run the fetchmail command. You will be prompted for your account password and then you will see the flow of mail start scrolling up your screen.
Example 4. Fetchmail Session
<tbielawa>@(shell)[~] 12:30:35 $ fetchmail Enter password for tibielawa@gwpop.wvu.edu: 13 messages for tibielawa at gwpop.wvu.edu. reading message tibielawa@gwpop.wvu.edu:1 of 13 (4004 header octets)... (2265 body octets)... not flushed reading message tibielawa@gwpop.wvu.edu:2 of 13 (447 header octets) (1804 body octets).. not flushed reading message tibielawa@gwpop.wvu.edu:3 of 13 (5204 header octets)..... (2748 body octets).. not flushed
![[Note]](icons/note.png){kind=icon} | Note |
|---|---|
It is acceptable to ignore messages like:
|
This part of the guide covers how to configure your Mail Reader
to read the mail/INBOX file we configured
procmail to save your mail to in the last section. It is safe to
skip this section if you didn't configure your client for
offline viewing.
Open your Mail Reader, press S for settings,
C for advanced, then select the
inbox-path field. Clear, or leave the field
blank when you are prompted for Name of the
Inbox server. When you are prompted for
Folder name to use for INBOX
set it to mail/INBOX. This is the mail file
that we configured procmail to create in the last step. As we
did before, press E then Y to
commit your changes. Press Q then
Y to quit your mail reader.
Unlike in section 3, when you relaunch your mail reader you will NOT be prompted to authenticate to your mail server because the messages have already been retrieved by fetchmail.
In this part of the guide we will cover configuring your mail reader to send mail. We will use your WVU MasterID[1] account for authenticating against the SMTP servers.
Begin by launching your mail reader as before and going to the
advanced settings page (S →
C). Press the down arrow until the
smtp-server field is highlighted, and then
select it. Unlike the previous instructions, the value you use
isn't different from GroupWise to MIX.
For example, I would use this line:
exsmtp.wvu.edu/ssl/user=tbielawa
Before you're finished on the Advanced Settings screen you'll
have to set the user-domain field
correctly. The user-domain field specifies the
domain part (right-hand side) of your return address on outgoing
email.
For MIX use:
mix.wvu.edu
For GroupWise use:
mail.wvu.edu
Finally, you can customize the personal-name
field to however you wish your name to be displayed when people
receive mail from you.
