Why would I use Sendmail-Fetchmail, etc.?

[mrtaber]

Just wondering. I have my machine stable and the way I like it, but I'm an inveterate tinkerer. I'm using Evolution 2.0.2 to access my 2 POP3 accounts. Would there be any benefit in firing up Sendmail (or Postfix or whatever) and using that to feed Evolution, rather than just directly connecting. I'm a newbie, so sometimes real obvious things escape me

Thanks,
Mark Taber

[macemoneta]

Fetchmail and sendmail are useful if you have multiple users on your system. That way, a single process can retrieve the email at regular intervals for all users on your system, no matter what email software they are using (Evolution, Thunderbird, pine, mutt, etc.).

Using sendmail witth spamassasin, all your mail will get filtered for spam before it gets to Evolution. Evolution can interact with spamassassin (using the Junk and Not Junk buttons), to adjust the spamassassin filters.

Using fetchmail, your mail is retrieved and stored locally (on your system), even when you are not running Evolution (if the system is up). That's handy if your ISP provides limited email storage, and you get a bunch quickly (spam, email with large attachments, etc.). If you're not retrieving email fast enough, many ISPs will either start rejecting email, or worse, discard it.

[KeDruff]

I use fetchmail to download from multiple mail sources into a local mail spool. On the machine that runs my local mail server, I also run Apache and Squirrelmail. This way I have unlimited storage space for my email on a server I can access from anywhere on the web either via Evolution using IMAP or Squirrelmail and my mail is in the same location it was at home.

KD