PC World 1999 August/PCWorld_1999-08_cd.bin/doc/HOWTO/mini/TkRat

Text File | 1998-02-22 | 13KB | 357 lines

  TkRat mini-HOWTO
  Dave Whitinger, [e-mail]
  v1.1, 2 February 1998

  This is the TkRat mini-HOWTO. This document is geared toward anyone
  interested in using their Linux computer to send and receive Internet
  E-Mail.

  1.  Introduction

  This document is maintained by Dave Whitinger ([e-mail]).
  Please mail me with any questions or ideas you have regarding this
  HOWTO.

  This document will attempt to describe the following four things:

  1. Installing the TkRat E-Mail program.

  2. Downloading mail from an Internet Service Provider.

  3. Reading, storing, and sending mail

  4. Sorting the mail into folders

  The document assumes that you are running Linux with the X Window
  System, have already established a connection to an Internet Service
  Provider, and have a POP account with that provider.

  Disclaimer: All usual disclaimers apply.  The author cannot be held
  responsible for any (mis)use of the information given here.  This
  document does not attempt to be authoritative in any way.  The author
  voluntarily creates this document seperately from any entity with
  which he may be involved with.  By reading this document, you agree to
  cause the author no grief or trouble.  :)

  2.  Installing TkRat

  I would like to stress that there are many excellent E-Mail programs
  available for Linux.  It is always a matter of personal preference
  when selecting which one you will use.  That said, I will tell you
  that I have been using a program called "TkRat" for almost a year now
  - and I love it.  It's a graphical program that has all the features
  you would expect from a quality mail program, it's easy to learn how
  to use, it's powerful, and it's free.  For these reasons, I'll only be
  covering TkRat in this HOWTO.

  The first thing you need to do is download TkRat.  You can either
  obtain the sources and compile them, or you can get the binaries.

  Here are some URLs for the software:

  ╖  The Red Hat 5.0 binary is available at
     http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/tkrat/rh5/tkrat-1.1-1.i386.rpm
     <http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/tkrat/rh5/tkrat-1.1-1.i386.rpm>

  ╖  The Red Hat 4.x binary is available at
     http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/tkrat/sw/rh4/tkrat-1.1-1.i386.rpm
     <http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/tkrat/rh4/tkrat-1.1-1.i386.rpm>

  ╖  The Source RPM is available at
     http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/src/tkrat-1.1-1.src.rpm
     <http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/src/tkrat-1.1-1.src.rpm>
  ╖  Finally, the tar.gz source is availabe at
     http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/src/tkrat-1.1.tar.gz
     <http://www.ntlug.org/~dave/sw/src/tkrat-1.1.tar.gz>

  When you have one of the above, you are ready to install it on your
  system.  Follow one of the two instructions below.

  ╖  For Red Hat Linux (and other RPM based distributions):

     ___________________________________________________________________
     rpm -Uvh tkrat-1.1-1.rpm
     ___________________________________________________________________

  ╖  To install the tar.gz source, use the commands:

     ___________________________________________________________________
     tar -zcvpf tkrat-1.1.tar.gz
     cd tkrat-1.1
     make
     make install
     ___________________________________________________________________

  If anything fails, consult the INSTALL and README files located in the
  tkrat-1.1 directory.

  Congratulations - TkRat should now be installed on your system.

  3.  Downloading your E-Mail

  In order to read E-Mail, it is usually best to download it using a
  program called "fetchmail".  The following instructions are known to
  work perfectly for version 2.2 of fetchmail - although they should be
  applicable to any version.

  (Note: Fetchmail is almost certainly already installed on your system,
  as it is included in all Linux distributions that I know of - if
  anyone knows this to be untrue, please let me know!).

  Perform the following steps:

  ______________________________________________________________________
  echo "server pop.com protocol pop3 username dave password foo" > ~/.fetchmailrc

  (Make sure to replace "pop.com" with the hostname to your ISP's pop server.  Replace
  "dave" with your username, and replace "foo" with your username's password.)
  ______________________________________________________________________

  Now, whenever you want to check your E-Mail, just type "fetchmail" at
  the prompt.  Fetchmail will go off and download all your mail and
  store it in your local mail folder.

  4.  Configuring TkRat

  From the prompt, type "tkrat" and press enter.  Click on "Create".
  Read the message it gives you, then click on "Continue".  At this
  point, you are brought to the main TkRat program.  The first thing you
  should do is customize it to your local system.

  1. Go the Admin menu, and select Preferences.

  2. Click on "Compose"

  3. Enter in your E-Mail address in the "Default Reply-To" field.

  4. Click on "Apply".

  5. Click on "Sending".

  6. In the "Use From Address" field, enter your E-Mail address,
     followed by your real name in paranthesis.  For example, mine looks
     like "[e-mail] (Dave Whitinger)"

  7. Enter your domain name in the "Domain" field.  If your E-Mail
     address is "[e-mail]" you'll enter "xyz.com".

  8. For "Send Via" select "SMPT".

  9. In the SMTP host: field, enter the SMPT server address of your ISP
     (they should be able to provide you with this information).

  10.
     Click "Apply", then "Dismiss".

  5.  Using TkRat

  Upon starting TkRat, You'll notice that you are in a folder called
  "INBOX".  Use fetchmail to download any new mail.  If you have any, it
  will appear in this INBOX folder.

  TkRat has an intuitive interface.  The top half of the screen is the
  list of messages you have (Each line is a seperate E-Mail).  The
  bottom half of the screen will be the actual content of the E-Mail.

  You can read E-Mails by simply clicking on any message in the list.

  When you are finished reading a message, you can move on the next
  message, reply to that message, compose a new message, or move the
  message to a different "Folder".

  Folders are a way of storing E-Mails into seperate "Folders".  This
  way, you can keep several folders for different topics you may receive
  E-Mail about.

  Perform the following steps to create folders:

  1. Click on Admin, then New/Edit Folders

  2. You will see a box with a "INBOX" folder.  Left-Click in that box.

  3. You are then presented with a menu, so select "New File Folder".

  4. You'll be given a dialogue box asking for information.

  5. In the first textbox - enter a name for the folder.

  6. In the second textbox - enter the filename you will use to store
     the messages in (Hint: Use something like
     /home/username/mail/name_of_folder.  So, if the first field says
     "Personal", the second field would say something like
     "/home/dave/mail/personal" (assuming your username is dave).

  7. Click OK.  You'll notice your new folder is now in the list of
     folders.  So, go to "Window" and then "Close".

  You can now Move messages to the new folder - and switch to that
  folder by selecting the folder's name under the "Folders" menu.

  Sending mail is also easy.  Click "Compose", type in the recipient's
  E-Mail address, type in a subject, and then write the message in the
  body.

  When you are finished, click on Send.

  6.  Automatically sorting mail into folders

  If you're like me, you get about 1,500 messages a day.  Each time you
  fetch your mail, you have to wade through all the messages looking for
  particular ones that interest you.

  This is not a problem anymore, thanks to Procmail.

  Procmail works like this: Procmail examines each message as it is
  downloaded, and will perform a series of tasks based upon certain
  rules that you've specified.

  Let's say, for example, that I get about 200 messages every day from a
  certain mailing list (in this example, I'm using the linux-foo list).
  Rather than have all those messages go directly into my main inbox, I
  would rather that they were automatically filtered into a box called
  "foo-list".

  The first step is to take an example mail message that came from that
  mailing list and examine the mail headers.

  I begin to notice a pattern.  Every message that comes from that
  mailing list has a line that says:

  Sender: [e-mail]

  I can now tell procmail to place every message that contains this line
  into a certain folder.

  The way I tell this to procmail is by way of a ".procmailrc" file.

  I will use my favorite text editor to create a text file in my home
  directory called ".procmailrc".

  The file will look something like this:

  ______________________________________________________________________
  LOGFILE=$HOME/.pmlog
  MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
  VERBOSE

  # linux-foo list
  :0 Hw
  * ^.*[Ss]ender: [e-mail]
  foo-list

  # if it got to this point, put it in my new mail folder
  :0 Hw
  newmail
  ______________________________________________________________________

  Examine the "Ssender" line.  You'll notice that that line is the one
  thing that all messages from that mailing list have in common.

  That section is telling procmail that when it sees a message come
  through with a header that looks like the above, to put it into the
  "foo-list" folder.

  The next section is saying that if the message matched nothing above,
  to just place it into newmail.

  Now, let's say that anytime I get a message from my good friend, EJ, I
  want it to go into a folder called "EJ".

  I'll just create a new section of my procmailrc file.  See below:

  ______________________________________________________________________
  LOGFILE=$HOME/.pmlog
  MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
  VERBOSE

  # linux-foo list
  :0 Hw
  * ^.*[Ss]ender: [e-mail]
  foo-list

  # Message from EJ!
  :0 Hw
  * ^.*[Ff]rom: [e-mail]
  ej

  # if it got to this point, put it in my new mail folder
  :0 Hw
  newmail
  ______________________________________________________________________

  Notice the new section for EJ.  When a message comes in with his E-
  Mail address in the "From" field, it will automatically place it into
  my "ej" folder.

  Now, let's say that there's some lamer out there who keeps on E-
  Mailing me.  I don't want to hear from him, but he's persistent.  Once
  again - procmail to the rescue.

  So, let's say I don't ever want to see any mail from Bill Gates.  I
  can setup a recipe to delete any mail that comes from him.  Look at my
  new procmailrc:
  ______________________________________________________________________

  LOGFILE=$HOME/.pmlog
  MAILDIR=$HOME/mail
  VERBOSE

  # Is it coming from Bill Gates?  If yes, DELETE IT!!!
  :0 Hw
  * ^.*[Ff]rom: [e-mail]
  /dev/null

  # linux-foo list
  :0 Hw
  * ^.*[Ss]ender: [e-mail]
  foo-list

  # Message from EJ!
  :0 Hw
  * ^.*[Ff]rom: [e-mail]
  ej

  # if it got to this point, put it in my new mail folder
  :0 Hw
  newmail
  ______________________________________________________________________

  Now I have a rather nice procmailrc file.  Let's examine what procmail
  will do to each message as it comes in.

  At first, it checks the message to see if it is from
  "[e-mail]". If it is, delete it, and it's done.

  If the message made it through the first check, it will see if it has
  the "[e-mail]" in the headers.  If it does, it
  will put it into the "foo-list" folder, and it's done.

  If the message still makes it past that, then it checks to see if it's
  from EJ.   If it is, it places it into the "ej" folder.

  Now, if the message passes all those tests, then it should just place
  it into my newmail folder.

  Once you have these folders in place and procmail is properly
  filtering the mail, you can just go into TkRat, "Admin - New/Edit
  Folder" and create the folders for each filename.  They will be
  located under /home/username/mail/foldername.

  7.  Copyright

  This HOWTO is copyright 1998 by Dave Whitinger, and is a free
  document.  You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of
  the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software
  Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version.

  8.  Acknowledgements

  Very special thanks go out to Martin Forsse'n ([e-mail])
  for authoring the TkRat mail user agent.

  Red Hat Software - for making all our lives so much easier.

  Greetings go out to the North Texas Linux User's Group in Dallas, TX,
  of which I am a member, and for whom I wrote this document.