Ok, I had to taotally re-install this weekend. I was trying to build a rootdisk and I accidentally deleted an important directory off of my system instead of the rootdisk in progress. The good thing about it is that i now know that I am able to reinstall by myself. I of course installed exim and fetchmail. I can send mail but I can't fetch it. I can fetch at shellworld so I know it isn't a problem with any of my email accounts. I can send, though I did have to put an entry in "/etc/email-addresses to accomplish that. I can use fetchmail to check how many messages there are, and if there is no message fetchmail terminates normally. If there are messages, however, I get no messages fetched because ai get '"smtp connection to localhost failed". I went back to my ppp account briefly without my dsl up to see if that was the source of the problem, but it wasn't. I obviously have something configured incorrectly on my machine, and any suggestions would be appreciated because I have been working and working at trying to solve this. I will still be able to read replies by going to shellworld and fetching for all of my accounts there. Thanks.