alternatives to mail.app? Unix?

[Clarus]

I have been have lots of different problems with mail.app and I would love to use a different mail suite. Is there any acceptable mail apps out there that can compare to claris emailer or close to it??? And cany anyone give some pointers on how to use the unix mail programs so I can have that as a backup if not my main program (shudder).


-Lucian

[tie]

Well, if you just need a backup, telnet into port 110 of the POP server.

Type

USER yourUserName

PASS yourPassword

STAT

RETR messageNumber

...

QUIT

[scruffy]

There's a lot easier than telnet. I think that fetchmail is installed by default, if not it should be easy enough to get. It's a little command that fetches mail from smtp or pop3 servers, and 'mails' it to you on your own computer. As such you need to have sendmail running on your own computer. You can have it firewalled off though, since it's only a local program using it.

You will need a file called .fetchmailrc in your home directory, and make sure that it is not world readable, if you want to put your password in it. You can leave out the password, and then type it each time you want to check your mail.

my .fetchmailrc looks like:

<tt>poll my.mail.server
protocol POP3
username myusername
password "mypassword"
keep</tt>

(The last line, keep, means leave the mail on the server.)

You can have as many "poll" entries as you have mail servers to check, each with their own username, password etc. As always, "man fetchmail" for more info.

After fetching my mail, I use pine to read it - I think I downloaded pine ( from http://www.washington.edu/pine )and installed it myself. It's pretty pleasant to use, and it's the only app I've been able to get to work worth a darn with pgp.

[HardyMacia]

I've always used Eudora. I've tried emailer, mail and others. I'm not sure what you liked about emailer, but eudora can ain't too bad. www.eudora.com should work and there is a os x version. I've played with the beta a bit and it seems solid. I'm not using os x full time yet so I'm not using the os x version of eudora full time, but I send mail with it occasionally.

Hardy

[Clarus]

well I have tried eudora and it has quit on me too but I am beginning to see where the root of my problem is. Both eudora and mail putz out when retrieving mail. Since mail retrieves on startup that explains why it quits so fast. Eudora waits for the get mail command and so the quit is delayed. I will have to use the unix solutions for the time being since that these problems came with the .3 update. I will have to wait til .4 and see if that helps.

-Lucian

[TommyWillB]

I know I shouldn't say this, but my MS Entourage (Outlook 6 for Office 2001) works fine as a Classic application.

Does Pine work for POP mail, or would you have to configure OS X to be a mail server?

(It does not look like either pine or Mail are installed by default.)