sendmail and dialups

[Richard Smith]

Martin Smith wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 10 Feb 2000, David Richards wrote:
> 
> >
> > hello,
> >       is there any way of dialing up your ISP and getting sendmail to
> > collect all your mail held in youre mailbox on their servers
> >  and send to the the correct users on the machine.
> > say i sent a email to david at skyforge.co.uk, i then login as david my machine
> > and be able to read the mail that has jsut arrvied
> 
> I was actually under the impression that sendmail does just that, as long
> as you are a user on that machine, perhaps someone will correct me if that
> is not the case...

That is not the case.

Sendmail implements the SMTP protocols which is how e-mail is pushed
around the Internet. At least one ISP can use SMTP to push your
incomming e-mail to you over the dial-up connection, however, most ISPs
place your incomming e-mail into one of their servers, and then lets you
fetch it using a pulling protocol (such as POP3).

Richard.