Getting Mail.app to work with (truly) local mail

[marmoset]

I've got sendmail up and running on my machine,
and overall it works well enough so that I'm
now sending mail directly through it rather
than going through someone else's SMTP server.
It also works for receiving mail -- all
mail sent to valid accounts on my host
(freeke.org) gets delivered to the
/var/mail hierarchy, but with one
caveat -- I can't figure out how to
get Mail.app to look at the local mailboxes
(i.e. the ones in /var/mail/<username>)

I'm sure I'm overlooking something obvious
here, but if anyone here has this working
I'd sure appreciate a pointer.

Thanks!

 

[ericmurphy]

This is a wild guess on my part (I know next to nothing about Sendmail), but it seems like you could get your mail configuring Mail as if your domain were on a remote machine, i.e., configure the e-mail settings in the Internet preference panel with your incoming mail server as mail.freeke.org (or whatever you ended up calling it), with your username and password. It should work, even if it's not the most efficient way to do it.

After all, your machine doesn't care where the IP address points to, so long as a DNS somewhere resolves the domain name correctly, right?

 

[marmoset]

> This is a wild guess on my part (I know next to nothing
> about Sendmail), but it seems like you could get your mail > configuring Mail as if your domain were on a remote
> machine, i.e., configure the e-mail settings in the
> Internet preference panel with your incoming mail server
> as mail.freeke.org (or whatever you ended up calling it),
> with your username and password. It should work, even if
> it's not the most efficient way to do it

I tried that tack, but the current version of the PB
doesn't include POP or IMAP server software, so
it doesn't work out of the box. I installed
the University of Washington IMAP daemon (which
is packaged along with pine), but I haven't
really messed with it all that much yet.
I imagine if I beat on it long enough, I could
get that to work ... But I found
a simpler solution .

Back when I was trying to get sendmail running,
I followed the advice at sendmail.com to
change permissions on several directories.
One of the directories I changed was /var/mail.

I found that when I changed the mode of /var/mail
back to 1777, the next time I ran Mail.app and
checked for new mail, it created a new mailbox
called "Active". "Active" appears to correspond
to the incoming mail in /var/mail -- whenever
I force a mail check in Mail.app, it moves any
new mail for the user logged in from the
/var/mail hierarchy into this new "Active"
mailbox file.

That's what I wanted -- yay!