[comp.os.minix] Mail--how does one set it up?

kapil@zarquon.uchicago.edu (Kapil Paranjape) (01/31/91)

Can some kind soul tell me what to do to set up mail. After I got
the system walking---i.e. a weak form of running :-), I tried to 
send mail to some of the other "non-users" (they aren't getting *near*
the system till things are satisfactory!), and their system mailboxes
acquired some non-ASCII junk! The manual is strangely silent on the
point of what is necessary to set up the mailer-deamon process and this
may be the problem. In any case HELP!

Thanks in advance,
Kapil.

system@pa3ebv.nl.mugnet.org (System Eng.) (02/04/91)

In article <910202513@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org>, waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org (Fred 'The Rebel' van Kempen) wrote:
> In article <1991Jan30.173551.4547@midway.uchicago.edu>, kapil@zarquon.uchicago.edu (Kapil Paranjape) wrote:
>> Can some kind soul tell me what to do to set up mail. After I got
> 
> Mail?  Which mail?  The defective /bin/mail that Peter Housel and I
> wrote _ages_ ago?  That shouldn't even _be_ in 1.5 :-(
I totaly agree with Fred van Kempen on this point. I regenerated all my 
commands using stdio(3). And copied them all (including mail) to /usr/bin, 
/bin and /etc.
Then I tried to use wmail (linked to mail). What then happened I will
not describe :-(
It took me about an hour to understand what had happened and copy wmail
back to /usr/bin.

> TRy installing W-MAIL (local mail agent), U-MAIL (smart mailer) and
> UUCP/MINIX.  Available from the plains.NoDak.edu server.
Works fine here.

Regards from Peter.

Peter J. de Vrijer           |  UUCP: peter@pa3ebv.nl.mugnet.org
Tel: +31 38 660735           |  packet radio: peter@pa3ebv.ampr.org 
Ministerlaan 9               |
8014 PL Zwolle               |  "And yet I'm happy,
The Netherlands              |   I can't figure it out."     Snoopy

kls@ditka.Chicago.COM (Karl Swartz) (02/04/91)

In article <910202513@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org> waltje@uwalt.nl.mugnet.org (Fred 'The Rebel' van Kempen) writes:
>In article <1991Jan30.173551.4547@midway.uchicago.edu>, kapil@zarquon.uchicago.edu (Kapil Paranjape) wrote:
>> Can some kind soul tell me what to do to set up mail.

>TRy installing W-MAIL (local mail agent), U-MAIL (smart mailer) and
>UUCP/MINIX.  Available from the plains.NoDak.edu server.

I grabbed these late August for my pc532, which currently is running a
port of PC Minix 1.3.  After looking at U-MAIL I decided to use smail
2.5 instead, since that's what I already run on other machines, it
does the job well, and it seemed fairly easy to install.  The only
changes required were:

    defs.h
	I punted the UNAME option and just compiled in the hostname.

    misc.c
	The #include <sys/utstime.h> should be surrounded by #ifdef
	UNAME.  Also, tzname() doesn't exist so I hardware this in.

I did install W-MAIL and UUCP.  The former had a habit of injecting a
blank line after the initial From_ line, effectively putting most of
the header lines in the message body.  The offending code was near the
bottom of the deliver() routine.

The UUCP, unfortunately, required a fair bit of work.  While some of
this was to add functionality of more mature uucps, several things
were serious bugs, most notably an off-by-one in the NAK code that
caused the entire connection to die after an error with WINDOWS > 1.
I haven't done much with it recently but if this is still a current
version and anybody is working on it I'd be happy to share all of my
changes.

-- 
Karl Swartz		|INet	kls@ditka.chicago.com
1-408/223-1308		|UUCP	{uunet,decwrl}!daver!ditka!kls
			|Snail	1738 Deer Creek Ct., San Jose CA 95148
"It's psychosomatic.  You need a lobotomy.  I'll get a saw." (Calvin)