• POP, the postoffice protocol

    Last updated -[Mon Jul 12 21:43:27 1999 by cxh]-

    Description of the pop installation

    pop is the Post Office Protocol, a way for remote machines to connect to a Unix box and get mail. The most common pop situation is to use Eudora from a mac to connect to Unix. I believe Exmh and emacs can also use pop to read mail.

    exmh and pop

    You can use pop with exmh. Note that the mh binaries on sww seem to have been setup so that pop won't work. The Solaris binaries are in /opt/mh/bin , the SunOS binaries are in /usr/local/mh/bin It looks like exmh won't work with poper, but it will work with popd. The trick is to have a ~/.xmhcheck file with the following line inbox dewitt.eecs.berkeley.edu YOURUSERNAME where YOURUSERNAME is your Unix user id. Then to change exmh's preferences by mousing on Preferences -> Incorporate Mail -> multidrop and then saving your preferences.

    We are working on getting kerberos to work, but in the short term, exmh uses RPOP, which uses ~/.rhosts like the Berkely r* commands (rsh, rcp etc.). So, to get exmh to work, you will need to have the machine you are logging in from listed in your .rhosts file

    Troubleshooting pop and exmh

    1. Consult the exmh man page
    2. Consult the popper man page.
    3. Try running the local inc in /opt/mh/bin, rather than the inc in /usr/sww/bin. Use which inc to see which inc binary you running, then adjust your path accordingly.
    4. Check that you have a ~/.xmhcheck file
    5. Try rshing from the local host to the remote host. If you have problems, check your remote ~/.rhosts file.
    6. Try using telnet hostname pop3. See Testing below for more information.
    7. Try using inc -host hostname from the remote host. This command should connect to the pop host and get your mail for you. inc is the command that exmh runs. See for the tcl code that runs the inc command.
    8. Look in /etc/inetd.conf and see where popper is logging to, then check that file.
    9. As a last restore, running truss or trace on inc might help. Since inc is setuid root so that it can mess with the mail spool, truss won't work on it. The solution is to use which to determine where the inc binary is, then copy the binary elsewhere and run truss on it.

    Notes about using exmh remotely

  • To send mail from a portable standalone machine, sendmail must be running. Under SunOS sendmail is started in /etc/rc.local. Under Solaris2, sendmail is started in /etc/rc2.d/S88sendmail, which is a link to /etc/init.d/sendmail.
  • Unlike Eudora, exmh will not save up mail to be sent all in one fell swoop. Possibly configuring sendmail to do that might do the trick. The command to flush the mail queue is /usr/lib/sendmail -q -v.

    • Pop daemon details

    Below we discuss the various pop daemons. Most users won't care about these details.

    Testing

    To test a pop daemon, telnet to the port that the daemon is running on. cxh@markov 507% telnet dewitt pop3 Trying 128.32.240.53... Connected to dewitt.eecs.berkeley.edu. Escape character is '^]'. +OK QUALCOMM Pop server derived from UCB (version 2.1.4-R3) at dewitt.eecs.berkeley.edu starting. QUIT QUIT +OK Pop server at dewitt.eecs.berkeley.edu signing off. Connection closed by foreign host. cxh@markov 508%

    popper

    A Working POP3 server for a number of platforms including Solaris 2.x is finally available from QUALCOMM, the company which maintains Eudora, as ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/quest/unix/servers/popper/qpop2.1.4-r3.tar.Z

    Currently we are using popper on dewitt. popperis installed as /usr/local/etc/popper.

    1. I obtained popper from ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/
    2. ./configure --enable-apop=/etc/pop.auth --with-popuid=pop
    /etc/inetd.conf has the following: # Post Office Protocol pop stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/etc/popper popper -d -t /var/spool/mqueue/POPtr pop2 stream tcp nowait root /usr/local/etc/popper popper -d -t /var/spool/mqueue/POPtr I had to add lines to /etc/services: pop2 109/tcp # Post Office pop 110/tcp # Post Office

    popd

    Currently we are using popper, but the mh popd daemon was started up on mho in /etc/rc.local:

    # Post Office Protocol # if [ -f /usr/local/mh-6.8.3/lib/popd ]; then /usr/local/mh-6.8.3/lib/popd >/dev/null 2>&1 & echo -n " popd" fi

    popd is also running on messier.

    The popd we are running is pop3 from the MH distribution. I built the mh distribution by hand, which was no small task.

    There is a sol2 popd on sww, but it is readable only by user 18.

    cxh@markov 126% ls -l /usr/sww/etc/popd -rwx------ 1 18 147800 Dec 9 13:05 /usr/sww/etc/popd*

    Looks to me like popd in mh can be built to support kerberos I have not tried it, but the mh-gen man page says:

    > KPOP > Support for KERBEROS with POP. This code builds > popd, inc and msgchk to support only the "kpop" pro- > tocol. This code is still experimental, but is > available for those sites wishing to test it.

    imapd

    imapd might be an alternative /usr/sww/doc/faq/mh.faq discusses imap

    popi

    popi is a mh program that can be used to connect to a pop host Unfortunately, the popi on sww is empty, probably for security reasons. -rwxr-xr-x 1 18 0 Dec 9 13:07 /usr/sww/bin/popi* popi is on mho in /usr/local/mh-6.8.3/bin/popi