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 supplyingI 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:
& 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.