“Even today, where many people equate the Internet with the WWW
and everybody talks about multimedia, email is one of the most
utilized Internet services. Configuring this service under Linux
can be tricky, especially if a dialup Internet connection is
used.”
“Usually sendmail is used as MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) under
Linux. It receives incoming email and delivers them to the users on
the host. But if the host is not connected to the Internet all the
time, sendmail can’t accept all incoming email. In this case
another server, which is online 24 hours, has to accept the email
instead. Usually, this is the mail server of your ISP. But the
mailserver of your ISP can’t deliver the email to the users on the
local host, so the mail has to be transfered from the mailserver to
sendmail. This is the job of fetchmail. It connects to the
mailserver, fetches the mail and then hands it over to
sendmail.”