On Tue, 2008-09-09 at 14:07 +0200, Timothy Murphy wrote: > Patrick O'Callaghan wrote: > > >> Are you just saying you could use another program in place of > >> sendmail? > ... > > >> Perhaps if you gave an explicit example of "speaking SMTP directly" > >> I would understand better. > > > > Fire up your favourite local email client (i.e. not a webmail service) > > and look for Preferences. > > OK, I see that I can indeed do this with kmail, indeed I am doing it. > But I would have described that as using kmail as my MTA > in place of sendmail for sending mail. Kmail, Evolution etc. are MUAs (Mail User Agents). They also happen to work as simple MTAs because they can talk SMTP, but their primary focus is on the user, not the mail transport. Thus they don't use SMTP to receive mail, just to send it (see below), and aren't considered daemons in the usual sense. Sendmail, Postfix etc. have no user interface to speak of and are focussed on queue management, security, efficient transport of large quantities of mail for many users etc. > What about receiving email - don't I have to run rmail or equivalent? The MUAs receive mail by a variety of methods, the most popular being IMAP and POP. In this sense they aren't acting as MTAs but as windows into a mail store maintained elsewhere, i.e. where an SMTP service is being run by some MTA daemon. The original model of MTS/MUA (MTS is Mail Transfer Service, meaning roughly the collection of interconnected MTAs on the Internet) assumed that the user would have a local MTA depositing mail in a local store to be picked up by his MUA. POP and IMAP were invented in recognition of the fact that many users aren't going to run a full MTA and that the "store" is not local but exists on a remote server. poc -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
