How to get mail to work?

[joneall]

I'm running Karmic and want the mail command to work.

First, the system didn't find the mail command, so I installed sendmail. Then it "Mailing to remote domains not supported". When I googled that, I fell on

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...il-ok.-727343/

which tells me, too late, I should use exim instead of sendmail. Actually, exim4-base is installed, but I have no idea what to do with it. In particular, i get

$ dpgk-reconfigure exim4
No command 'dpgk-reconfigure' found, did you mean:
Command 'dpkg-reconfigure' from package 'debconf' (main)
dpgk-reconfigure: command not found

Do I need to uninstall sendmail? Or is it not as bad as the above link says? Can someone recommend a good "How to..."?

Thanks in advance.

[doctordruidphd]

Re: How to get mail to work?

Depends on what you mean by "get the mail command to work".

If you are using a dedicated system that is left on all the time, with its own domain name and ip address, and you want to receive mail directly to your system from the internet, then yes, you will need exim4. Installing exim4 should overwrite the sendmail package; if not, you can remove sendmail. Configuring this is not easy, but not impossible, either.

These may be helpful:
http://www.flatmtn.com/article/setting-email-server
http://www.schabell.org/2007/01/how-...ntu-linux.html

If you receive your email from a service like yahoo, and you want to transfer that mail to and from that service to your PC using linux's internal mail system, then you will need mpop and msmtp (fetchyahoo for yahoo service). It is tricky to get them working, but I managed it. I can use either thunderbird or alpine to read mail from the local system that way. In this case, you do not need or want exim4.

I can give you more details on this if it's what you need.

[joneall]

Re: How to get mail to work?

Really all I want is for the mail command (or something equivalent) to be available so scripts can send mail they generate to remote mail addresses. As far as I know, I don't need a mail server for that. (Correct?) I will go on receiving my mail on my ISP's servers.

I will check out your links tomorrow morning. Thanks a lot for the help.

[tnorris]

Re: How to get mail to work?

Try using SSMTP. It's available in the repos. It allows you to use your SMTP server (i.e. the one you configure in your mail application) with the mail and sendmail commands. It works well for me. Here's a good article on it: http://www.linux.com/archive/feature/132006