how to setup a user's mail account

[gamblor01]

This is probably going to be one of the easiest questions ever to answer, but how do I setup a user's mail account on my system? For example, I have a /var/spool/mail/root and /var/spool/mail/Brandon but only root's file contains anything. If I try to send something to Brandon@localhost ....it never shows up. For example:

[root@meatwad mail]# ls
Brandon  root
[root@meatwad mail]# mail -s 'foo' root@localhost
hello, world
Cc:
[root@meatwad mail]# tail -n 5 root
To: root@localhost.localdomain
Subject: foo

hello, world

[root@meatwad mail]# cat Brandon
[root@meatwad mail]# mail -s 'test' Brandon@localhost
asdf
foo
bar
Cc:
[root@meatwad mail]# pwd
/var/spool/mail
[root@meatwad mail]# cat Brandon
[root@meatwad mail]#

Apparently my user knows that is the mail location though:

[Brandon@meatwad mail]$ set | grep MAIL
MAIL=/var/spool/mail/Brandon
MAILCHECK=60

Is there some trick to getting the non-root mail accounts working?

[knute]

Do you have an mta running on your machine (exim, etc...)?

If yes, is it running?

Is Brandon in the mail group??

[gamblor01]

Considering I don't know what an MTA is (I just googled it...mail transfer agent) I'm going to have to say no to that one. I did try a "usermod -G mail Brandon" but that didn't help. So I need exim or something like it you say?

I wonder why the mailbox works for root already then??

[klackenfus]

MTA = Mail Transfer Agent (a mail server, like Sendmail or something.)

[knute]

Some distro's set them up automagically on install so that they can send you that superneat welcome message.
What distro are you running anyway?

All that I could think of was exim. Sendmail is more common to be installed by default. If you look in your package managers section regarding mail, you will find others.


To see what groups brandon is in is easy.
1) as the user (brandon in this case), issue the command:

groups

2) as root, issue the command:

groups brandon

[gamblor01]

MTA = Mail Transfer Agent (a mail server, like Sendmail or something.)

Yup...I googled it.

As far as the distro goes it's Fedora Core 5. It's a virtual machine I've had around (and haven't messed with) for quite some time.

In any case, I have 2 project presentations to give next week and 2 homework assignments on top of that. I don't have the time to be messing around with this nonsense so I just sent the mail to /var/spool/mail/root and called it a day. This of course means I have a few scripts running as root but it's for a proof of concept only, so I only need it to work on Tuesday when I present it, then I'll shut everything down immediately afterwards so it shouldn't be a big deal.

On the bright side...everything is working beautifully right now! I have a google map on my website with 1 point plotted on it (my "starting point"). Then I send an email to a gmail address with GPS coordinates and fetchmail pulls it down via pop3 to my /var/mail/spool/root file. I wrote a shell script that sits in a loop, sleeping and checking the mail file for changes. When it senses the change, a Java program gets executed which parses the mail file then opens and inserts the tags into an XML file. Refresh your page and VIOLA! New points are plotted on the map.

Gotta love the sense of accomplishment when your code actually works the way it was intended.