Hello everybody,
Thanks a lot for the countless replies I got, and I got them fast.
Too much replies to be named one by one here.
Attached please find the summerized answer, original question and
detiled answers. And hey, I'm sending this mail from my UNIX box...
back to normal life!
--Nasser
SUMMERIZED ANSWER:
In most situations, POP3 and/or IMAP are enabled on Exchange; and
Exchane has SMTP support to talk to outside world. You should get the
server names for POP3 or IMAP to receive your email, and the server
name of your SMTP server (these can be obtained from the NT admin
people
of your network), and configure your mail client, which can be either
of
dtmail, netscape communicator, or specifically fetchmail to receive
and
send email. Ftechmail can provide the most flexibility of course.
If POP3 and IMAP are not enabled on Excahnge, you should ask the admin
people to enable at least one of them.
ORIGINAL QUESTION:
I have Solaris boxes on a network that almost everything is NT %-(,
and specifically our mail is managed by MS Exchange. So I'm stuck
with a PC
and MSOutLook, and you can imagine how I feel with not being able
torun
simple "mail" commands and/or grepping my mailbox, etc. I know very
little about NT/Exchange/OutLook.
Can you giude me on how I can receive my mail on my UNIX boxes from an
Exchange server? I even do not know if Exchange understands SMTP. And
I
want to have minimum interference with the network guys and their NT
setup. I run Solaris 2.6 and I presume other details such as patches
have nothing to do with this case.
DETAILED ANSWERS
While I mentioned the key points in the summerized asnwer above, I
found
some interesting points in answers I received from all those people
that are good to know for all of us. I'll try to list them here:
1. Fetchmail was recommended by a lot of people. I had heard about
about it, but never used it. If you use fetchmail to receive
your email, then you can use *whatever* mailer you prefer to
access your mail, even the command line mail for those who prefer
the good old days. Fetchmail puts your mail in your mailbox for
you, and you can set rules to distribute your mail based on your
preference into several mailboxes.
2. Note that your username on NT may be different from your email
address. In my case, nasser.manesh is my email address (set aside
the domain part), but it is not my email address on NT. So you
should suppy different strings as username and email addr when
you configure your POP3 client.
3. Some people mentioned that if you're on an Ultra 5 or 10, you can
get a SunPCi card and run NT on that. Personally, I prefer not
to do that!
4. I received suggestions on sticking with OutLook since it's a good
mail reader. Well, that's a matter of taste. In UNIX world, you
can have your mailbox in a simple plain text file, and then you
do zillions of things to it. You can simplly grep whatever you
want
in it, which is by far more powerful than "Find" in OutLook. etc.
5. To test if you have SMTP connectivity with the NT machine, you can
use mconnect, or simply telnet to it on port 25 and test basic
SMTP commands like HELO.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:14:08 CDT