How is mutt detecting my email settings?

xsive · 07-20-2009, 05:47 AM

I configured fetchmail + postfix so I could manage all my email locally and I'm using mutt to read it. Now, despite not having told mutt anything about how to send email from my computer it somehow manages to do it anyway.

What's going on? Is sendmail picking up my fetchmail settings somehow? Or is it something else?

acid_kewpie · 07-20-2009, 06:02 AM

not a networking question. moved.

You don't need to tell it. it will just pass mail to your local MTA (you'll probably have sendmail already running if you didn't know already), and that will just do an MX lookup on the domain of the recipient. and connect to that mail server. It's only if that approach fails, due to having issues like other ISP's assuming you are spam, that you need to look deeper.

xsive · 07-20-2009, 06:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by acid_kewpie

not a networking question. moved.

You don't need to tell it. it will just pass mail to your local MTA (you'll probably have sendmail already running if you didn't know already), and that will just do an MX lookup on the domain of the recipient. and connect to that mail server. It's only if that approach fails, due to having issues like other ISP's assuming you are spam, that you need to look deeper.

Oh, neat. Thank you for the helpful reply.
Is there a recommended way to do things? Do most people use the default behaviour of sendmail or configure it explicitly with their ISP's smtp settings?

acid_kewpie · 07-20-2009, 07:53 AM

Generally letting sendmail do it's thing is best, depends if you get caught out or not though.