tlug: Quest for e-mail

[Dave Gutteridge <dave@example.com>]

Hello All. This thread is now officially migrating from advocacy to the
main list, as it has now taken on a more technical nature.
A very basic technical nature mind you. My pursuit of making my Linux
machine into a mail server has exposed me to the fact that i'm even more
clueless than i thought i was. Hopefully i'll turn that around after
answering Stephens questions (which will raise more questions, so please
read on!)

Stephen asked:
>Tell us
>1.  Where you want to get mail from
>2.  Where you want to send it to
>3.  How you think it's supposed to get there
>4.  Where the world thinks your mailbox is now
>5.  Where you want it to be, if different
>6.  Where you want folders saved
>and what the role of the "mail server" is in all this.

Okay, the deal is that I have two web sites on this Linux machine all set
up and ready to go. One of them is the "d-rave.com" site that i have in my
little sig file at the bottom of this letter. This is my personal site
which i just use to experiment with exactly this kind of stuff and also for
my amusement(Please don't go there yet as it's still pretty lame while i'm
trying to get everything running!). The other site is, or at least will be,
for more serious concerns. Now, what I'm trying to accomplish is have it so
that I can use the ".com" addresses as an e-mail address. So, for example,
i could have "me@example.com". This is where i thought the mail server came
in. 
I thought a mail server was a thing like an FTP server, or like the web
pages i set up, where i would be able to set up a few perameters in some
config files or through an interface, and then be able to access these
e-mail addresses by remote machines. I thought mail would come to this
machine, be stored there, and then give it to me when i asked for it from,
say, my PC at home.
Jim gave me a pointer or two, so i tried what he said:

Jim wrote:
>There are lots of ways.  This is Unix.  :-) Here's one. By convention, mail
>servers hang around listening on port 25, ready to accept connections from
>other hosts.  Try doing 'telnet localhost 25' in an attempt to make a
>connection to that port on your own machine.  If you get "connection
>refused" there probably isn't a server running. Otherwise you may be
>rewarded with a banner that gives clues to the type/version of server
>running on your machine.  (Read the NAG.)

I typed in telnet localhost 25 at my prompt (for those of you just tuning
in, these days i interface with my Red Hat 5.1 machine by telnet), and
here's the response i got:

Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 linuxserver.rainbow.co.jp DSMTP ESMTP Server v2.2i

As suspected, there is a mail server already running and getting mail from
nobody and sending it to nobody. So now, what i'm looking to do get this
thing to understand that i want to use my registered domain names to create
mail addresses, and be able to send and recieve mail with them.
One thing i didn't mention before - my original Red Hat box with CDs and
manual are somewhere out at the end of the Chuo line while a friend of mine
borrows them and wrestles with it on his own computer.
So...
Is there a reference on the web which will give me a bit of a "how to" on
mail servers?
Is my understanding of mail servers still off base? I'm wondering if i
should be asking different questions.

And this is from left field:
I was poking around under the hood a bit, typing "help" to find out what
commands there were and what they did. And i came across this:

help NOOP
214-NOOP
214-No operation. Does nothing at all.
214 OK   

Why would there be a command that does nothing at all?

Thanks for reading. i hope you can give me a pointer or two.


	________________________________
	
	Dave Gutteridge
	3D Computer Animation Specialist
	e-mail: dave@example.com
	http://www.d-rave.com
	________________________________
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