# no Mail Transport Agent (MTA) working?

## f.kater

Hi,

I am trying to use 'mutt' as my email/news reader but I get more and more into trouble. Do you know an easier way to do it? Here is what I did...:

Someone informed me that 'mutt' is just a reader, so I emerged fetchmail.

I configured it with fetchmailconf.

fetchmail sees new emails but returns with an error: 'SMTP connect to local host failed'

Someone told me to install a MTA.

I serched the gentoo database and found exim, qmail etc. to be MTAs.

I emerged exim.

As far as I know MTA's task is to deliver mail from fetchmail to my local mail dir, is that true?

Now, I expected exim to be a daemon but it doesn't seem to be started from command line. Still, fetchmail doesn't fetch mail.

What would you do next? Is there an easier way to get 'mutt' into service?

Thanks,

 Felix

----------

## klieber

You don't have to have exim.  Fetchmail is retreiving emails just fine -- in fact, that's all it's supposed to do.  The SMTP error you're seeing is from mutt.  You need to configure mutt to use your ISP's SMTP server (assuming it has one.)

--kurt

----------

## Guest

Actually, it does sound like his fetchmail config. is causing it to connect to port 25 rather than using a "reliable mda" (using an mda line in the fetchmailrc file).

 *klieber wrote:*   

> You don't have to have exim.  Fetchmail is retreiving emails just fine -- in fact, that's all it's supposed to do.  The SMTP error you're seeing is from mutt.  You need to configure mutt to use your ISP's SMTP server (assuming it has one.)
> 
> --kurt

 

----------

## f.kater

Thank you for your help.

I found out that sendmail can do the MTA-job what fetchmail was missing. Further, I tried 'rc-update add default sendmail' (just by random) and so the sendmail daemon was started - and fetchmail did non have problems to deliver the mail anymore.

Meanwhile I have nevertheless switched to Sylpheed which is an excellent email client and doing all these jobs internally (as far as I know). Maybe I'll come back to console email programs and sendmail, fetchmail, ... but for now l'll keep my hands off it till it is necessary for me to deal with it...  :Wink: 

Thank you,

 Felix

----------

