Sorry for the delay, I was hoping someone with some pop3 experience would have popped in by now

I do believe if you wanna pick up your mail via the pop3 protocol you'll need to install a pop server as well, something like qpopper from eudora. There are surely others, that's just my example.

I personally use IMAP which was excellent and very easy to setup IMHO. I can walk you through that a bit (I use a different delivery method than you probably, Maildir but it should be similar) and can assist with setting up mail clients with that if you'd like.



Cool

oh, i thought postfix was either a smtp, or imap, or pop, or whatever. how do I check my mail with postfix then?

Postfix and Sendmail are smtp servers (I believe?) which send and recieve mail for the server, they are all in one for that portion of mail handling. From there you've got local delivery which can also be done with client/server but sometimes use procmail as a great sorter. From there for external delivery, usually looking pop or imap. External being even within your network even, unless you've got procmail (I've never done it?) setup to sort to other boxes within the lan (Again, this is no problem with IMAP).

If it's on the same box as your mail client, you just setup your mail client to look (if using mbox) at /var/spool/mail/user for the mail. If you are using Maildir's then it'd be ~/.maildir/new depending on how you've got that all setup.

Confusion is certainly a huge cloud surrounding mail, but if you follow some of the how-tos and read some descriptions of the tools involved, I think it'll become hazy rather than cloudy Here's a bit on procmail:
http://www.ii.com/internet/robots/procmail/qs/#overview
Check out some of those links there, they'll likely help you understand what's going on.

Cool

youre not kidding this is confusing.

########## Please confirm that I'm understanding this much of it ##########

I wanted to be able to get a yadda@mydomain email address being served on my nix box, and be able to access the email from it with outlook express, or evolution, or some other mail handler. In order to do this, I need two programs running? (ie.... postfix, and IMAP)?



How do you check the mail with just plain old postfix, is that possible? Or, (am I understanding this correctly) is postfix by itself, or smtp useless?

BTW, I truly appreciate all your help Master C, You've really answered a lot of questions, and gone above and beyond as far as support. Thank you.

in all these setups for procmail it says to set up a file called .procmailrc
is this talking about /home, or is this talking about the directory that procmail is in? I can't figure this out.

Hi, sorry for the delayed/late reply, I have family in town and have been busy

Ok, so...

Yeah, purty much. SMTP is part of the tools involved in mail checking, but not everything. It's the 'module' design, grab this that functions great for this part, grab that for that part, stir (do not shake) and send/recieve mail.

IMAP is fairly easy to setup, it might even be on your install discs! Which mailbox type have you defined for use in your main.cf file? Maildir or mbox? Or, neither? That'll help me when discussing IMAP setup. Postfix by itself is actually not useless, very integral in the whole mail deal. Probably the most for the mail server itself. If you were running a single box, that would be all you would need as locally your mail can be grabbed from wherever Postfix stores it (/var/spool or /var/mail/spool for mbox) and read directly with your client there (kmail whatever). But for retrieval from a remote host, other mail programs have been created for such. I really don't know if procmail will be enough to sort, but only because I went with IMAP even for local retrieval.

HTH

Cool