I just installed Mandrake 9.1, and through all the troubles I finally got it working to my liking.... however when I connect to its mail (from another pc) server, should I enter pop3.<hostname> or just <hostname> ....?? as before it wasn't allowed to connect (I think shorewall was stopping it if I just used <hostname> yet now it works...>

and another thing, when I was attemping to get mail working, ie recieve mail directly from the net onto my server it wasnt working, then all of a sudden once I enabled the internet connection at boot it worked... could anyone shed light on why this happened for me?

Well, uh... you do need Internet access to download Internet mail... fetchmail should be able to pull down mail into local directories for you automatically.

As for connecting to a mail server on your LAN, you either use the hostname (if you have it configured in the hosts file on the client machine, or your client machine is doing WINS resolution from a Samba server on your Linux box, or if your Linux box has a local DNS zone). The only way you would use pop3.hostname.tld is if you actually gave the Linux box that hostname (via one of the above methods).

If you haven't configured your hosts to be in a domain, then you would just use the hostname. Otherwise you can use either the hostname, or the fully qualified name (host.domain.tld).