Chapter 23. Transporting and Handling Email Messages

Electronic mail (email ) is one of the most desirable features of a computer system. You can send and receive email on your Linux system locally between users on the host and between hosts on a network. You have to set up three classes of software to provide email service. These are the mail user agent or mailer, the mail transport agent (MTA), and the transport protocol.

The mailer provides the user interface for displaying mail, writing new messages, and filing messages. Linux offers you many choices for mailers. They are always being improved, and a particular mailer may provide certain features, such as the ability to serve as a newsreader or as a web browser.

Mailers tend to differ in terms of their MIME support. (MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions. It is really not multimedia-specific, but more a general standard for describing the contents of email messages.) Some do it better than others. It's difficult to give a recommendation here, though, since all mailers are continually moving toward better MIME support. Also, the problem is often not with the mail software, but rather with the need to register MIME types with the right viewer/handler applications in your environment.

The mailer relies on the MTA to route mail from one user to another, whether locally or across systems. The MTA in turn uses a transport protocol, usually either Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP, a very old protocol that was once common and has almost died out in the Western world, but is still common in regions with slow and unreliable dial-up lines) or Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP), to provide the medium for mail transfer.

There are a number of possible scenarios for using email on a Linux system, and depending on those scenarios, you will have to install a different set of software packages. However, no matter which option you choose, you will always need a mailer.

The first scenario applies to dial-up access to the Internet via an Internet service provider (ISP). In this scenario, there is often only one user on the Linux machine, although this is not a requirement. The ISP accepts your mail from the Internet and stores it for you on its hard disks. You can then retrieve the mail whenever you want by using the common Post Office Protocol (POP3) or the newer Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP). Outgoing mail in this scenario is almost exclusively sent via the SMTP protocol, which is universally used to transport mail over the Internet.

In the easiest case, you use your mailer both to retrieve the mail via POP3 or IMAP and to send it back via SMTP. When you do this, you do not even need to set up an MTA because the mailer handles everything. This is not terribly flexible, but if all you want is to access your mail easily, this might be an option for you. Mailers that support this include KMail from KDE and Mozilla's built-in mail program (both described later).

Browser-based email clients such as gmail or GMX are yet another story. They need to operate on a mailbox that is stored on a server; this mailbox could be filled by either POP3 or IMAP, often automatically. These days, it is quite common for browser-based email clients to use IMAP.

If you want more flexibility (which comes at the price of more configuration and maintenance work), you can install an MTA such as Postfix, described in the next section. You will need a program that transports the mail from your provider's POP3 or IMAP server. This program fetches your mail when you ask it to and passes the messages on to the MTA running on your system, which then distributes the mail to the recipients' mail folders. One program that does exactly that is fetchmail, which we cover later in this chapter. Outgoing mail is again sent via SMTP, but with an MTA running on your machine, you can choose not to send the outgoing messages directly to your provider's SMTP server, but rather to your own server, which is provided by the MTA. The MTA then forwards the mail to your provider, which in turn sends it to the recipients. With this setup, you can instruct your MTA to send outgoing mail at certain intervals so that you do not always have to make a dial-up connection.

The third scenario is meant for machines that have a permanent connection to the Internet, either because they are in a network that has a gateway with a permanent connection, or because they are using a leased line to your Internet provider. In this case, you might want to receive mail messages as soon as they arrive at your provider and not have them stored there. This also requires setting up an MTA. Incoming mail will be directed to your SMTP server (i.e., your MTA). Your provider will have to set things up accordingly for this to work.

Of course, there are many more scenarios for using mail, and mixtures between the three mentioned are possible as well. If you are going to set up a mail service for a whole network, you will most certainly want to read the Linux Network Administrator's Guide (O'Reilly) as well as a book about your MTA.

You have a number of software choices for setting up email on a Linux host. We can't describe all the available email solutions, but we do describe some packages that are often used and quite suitable for their respective tasks. Mail programs for end users, such as KMail and Evolution, have already been described in detail in previous chapters. In this chapter we document what we think are the most popular Linux advanced tools at this time: the Postfix mail transport agent and the fetchmail implementation of the POP3 and IMAP protocols. These are relatively simple to configure but provide all the features most users need. In addition, with these tools, you can cover all the scenarios described earlier.