Quoth John on Wed, Nov 24, 1999: > I'm trying to configure a stand-alone Debian box connected by modem
> to a commercial ISP so that fetchmail will collect. exim act as MTA and
> Pine as reader and email preparer etc. My ISP uses 'pop' for mail server,
> 'relay' for SMTP and 'news' for NNTP.
>
> At the moment, I'm confused by a number of things. Much of my first
> attempts must be OK for I can send email (using Pine) and collect
> (via Fetchmail - although it justs dumps everything into /var/spool/
> mail/<username>). Basically, things are messy and I seem unable to
> grasp the fundamentals of the overall picture.
>
> Hypothetically, my system is 'eden', only user is 'adam' (there may
> eventually be a second, 'eve'), ISP is 'ark.co.uk' where I log in as
> 'noah' and use as password 'dove'.
>
> In the basic configuration of exim, the second question asks for 'the
> 'visible name' of your system'. That suggests 'eden'
It's better to set hostnames to have dot in them, e.g.,
eden.heaven.
> - however, I have
> a beginners guide which says 'set the visible name to the name of your
> ISP'. Most other literature (of which I have too much!) does not define
> what visible name means nor from where it is viewed.
It seems to be some Debian thing. See your exim config and see
where the name appears. Whatever it is, it's better to set
local_domains to your hostname (eden.something) and rewrite
addresses to your ISP when needed.
I'll look into the Debian package (Exim 3.03 from potato) and see
what they have there.
> Can anyone suggest a source of a simple explanation and definition
> of words and expressions used so that I can get some overall
> understanding of mail.
RFC 821, RFC 822, and the Exim manual may provide some insight,
but I'm not sure that there is any good overall explanation of
mail for beginner sysadmins.
> If I am right, some words have different meanings
> according to circumstances.
Yes, especially when they are invented on the fly.
