Reading my mail from NT1 (qpopper)

Reading my mail from NT1 (qpopper)

If you’ve been following this diary, you’ll know I can’t read my FreeBSD mailbox from
Pegasus under NT.   Here’s the question I posted to the FreeBSD Questions
mailing list
.

I've installed qpopper. I have two users on my system. I'm trying to read their
mailboxes from my NT box using the Pegasus mail client. I can read the mail for one user,
but not for the other. The message displayed on the console is "-ERR Password
supplied for "root" is incorrect".

I hope it's wanting the same password as used to logon using root at the console.
Because that's what I'm supplying

I notice that in /var/mail, I have the following entries:

.abcdef.pop abcdef root

I don't get the error for the abcdef user (not the actual name). Should there be a
.root.pop entry in this directory? If so, how should it be created?

One of the replies I received suggested that root cannot login over the network (by
default).  This was to prevent dictionary attacks against telnet.  The writer
suggested I add a .forward file in /root.  They figured they
were making a guess.  But they weren’t far wrong.

.forward and /etc/aliases

I started searching for .forward documentation.  In the mailing list archives I found a
reference to /etc/aliases.  If you check this file, you’ll find a section
that looks like this:

# Well-known aliases -- these should be filled in!
#root:
#manager:
#dumper:

For my situation, I changed the above to the following:

# Well-known aliases -- these should be filled in!
root: abcdef
manager: abcdef
dumper: abcdef

After making these changes, remember to run newalisases so that you changes
will show through to sendmail.

Testing the forward

To test this, I started mail and sent mail to root in the hopes that it was forwarded
to abcdef.  Here’s how to do that:

# mail
& m root
Subject: hi there.
How are you?
^d

What you type is in italics.  Everything else is a machine generated
prompt.

Getting the email

The object of this exercise was to allow me to read my FreeBSD mailbox from NT1 (see topology).  In Pegasus, I set my POP3 host to be the FreeBSD
box.  The user name and password reflected the abcdef account.  Your email
client will have similar settings. 

Well, it worked!  I can read my mailbox
from NT1.  Great!

What about the stuff in the mailbox?

I have 30 messages in the root mailbox.  How do I forward existing message to
another user?  That’s for another day.

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