Re: mailx (how is it able to send email?!?)

Beowulf <beowulf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
I have mailx on my system, it was installed yesterday as part of the
package installation of aide.
[snip]
How does the above work? I mean, when I set up an email account with
evolution or kmail I needed to specify my mail server of my ISP, username,

Local mail (from a local user to another user on the same machine)
doesn't need to go out to your ISP. It uses the machine's Mail
Delivery Agent (MDA). Nowadays, that's procmail or "deliver" (on
Linux and other free OS's). It knows this because the mail's sent to
blah as opposed to blah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

password, etc. Is mailx acting as a mail server, and does an ISP simply
...................^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Trivially speaking, yes, sort of. More like local mail doesn't need a
full blown mail server to sort out local delivery.

allow such email generated by mailx to flow through the net, etc. I guess
this might be so simple I am missing it (my brain is slow on some things,

:-)

MUA: Mail User Agent - Thunderbird, mutt, pine, kmail, balsa,
...

MDA: Mail Delivery Agent - procmail, deliver, ...

MTA: Mail Transport Agent (aka SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer
Protocol]) - Sendmail, Exim, Postfix, Qmail, ssmtp, ...

this must be one of those concepts). So in theory if I wanted to, could I
use mailx for all my email, have friends send me email somehow and then
read that email with mailx?

Only for local mail, or mail from others with login IDs on the same
box.


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