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THIS DOCUMENT CONTAINS OUTDATED INFORMATION AND IS PRESENT FOR
HISTORICAL INTEREST ONLY.
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Reading email on the srcf (or other linux machines that need this)
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BACKGROUND

UNIX machines have, traditionally, had a 'mail' command which lets you
send mail to other users of the system. When the Internet was
invented, one of its first uses was the exchange of email. The early
system made the assumption that, to get mail to
someone@machine.place.org, it should talk to machine.place.org. In the
modern internet, partly to simplify administration and partly to
prevent abuse and breaches of security, this is no longer true.

Within Cambridge, only a small number of machines are allowed to have
mail sent to them directly. The SRCF is not one of these. To get
around this problem, you can use a program called fetchmail.

In this document, I'll assume that you are spqr1@cam.ac.uk, that you
normally read your mail on hermes, and you can use a text editor to
create files (if you can't, try pico or emacs. Within emacs, type
ctrl-x then t for a tutorial), and your hermes password is "wibble".

NECESSARY FILES

Create these in the base of your home directory (~ or /home/spqr1).

1. A file called .fetchmailrc containing the line:

poll hermes user spqr1 pass wibble

2. A file called crontab containing the line:

*/5 * * * * fetchmail -s

TYPE THE FOLLOWING

chmod 600 .fetchmailrc
crontab crontab

WHAT HAS THIS DONE?

The .fetchmailrc file specifies where you want to get your mail from
and how. fetchmail will log into hermes, download any new messages,
put them in your inbox on SRCF, and delete them from hermes. The chmod
command prevents other users from reading it (and hence your
password).

The crontab file asks UNIX to run fetchmail -s every five
minutes. "crontab crontab" installs this file. crontab -r uninstalls
it again, if you want to stop using fetchmail.

You can now use pine, mh, vm, exmh, mutt or any one of a huge range of
programs to read and send mail.

FURTHER READING

Manpages (e.g. to read foo(1) type "man 1 foo")
fetchmail(1), crontab(1), crontab(5), mail(1), pine(1)

"Programming in the UNIX Environment" -- Kernighan & Pike
(A useful book even if you never need to program. Superbly well
written.)