first time Fedora for me, any tips?

[STYMA, ROBERT E (ROBERT)]

> > If you are using this for a home machine and your ISP provides your
> > email account, you can turn sendmail off.  The email client with
> > Mozilla or the one with Firefox (is it Thunderbird?) can talk to
> > your isp's POP server just like outlook express did on windows.
> > You can avoid the headaches of mail administration all together.
> ----
> not entirely sure how one thing affects the other
> 
> sendmail is an MTA - it is a transport agent
> 
> POP3 is a client protocol - has nothing to do with MTA
> 
> sendmail/postfix running on local system means that local mail - i.e.
> local error & logs are sent to root or whomever is aliased to root as
> either a local user or to another server
> 
> a more intelligent method - I believe that you refer to it as 
> 'headaches
> of mail administration' would be to use fetchmail to retrieve 
> your email
> and provide local delivery that you could use from local computers set
> up as an IMAP account - this having distinct advantages of 
> running your
> own procmail scripts to sort/screen email - use spamassassin &/or
> various anti-virus implementations such as clamav to 
> block/filter email.
> You could see the same email from different mail client programs,
> different computers, etc. but this would require something 
> like dovecot
> to be installed & configured (dovecot is an IMAP & POP3 server). SOME
> mail clients allow you to use a 'local' mail store, thereby 
> removing the
> need to set up IMAP/POP3 service but this tends to be a 1 
> application, 1
> machine solution.
> 
> Of course, as you suggest, you can configure most any email client to
> use a POP server and an SMTP server and not deal with the 
> 'headaches' as
> you put it. I don't see how in this situation, any advantage is gained
> by shutting sendmail off - or by installing/using postfix.
> 
> Craig
> 
The point I was making was, unless you have a good reason to do so,
there is no need to set up a mail transport.  If you are setting up
your own domain locally so you can receive mail at me at mydomain.org 
then you need a mail transport agent.  If you are just settin up a
Linux box for personal use and getting mail via me at cox.net or whatever
is acceptable, you do not need a mail transport agent.  Since the
original post was titled, "first time Fedora for me, any tips?", 
I am assuming a desktop machine and not a mail server.  If I were
building a windows box, the user would just point outlook express
to the ISP's mail server, or the internal one if it is in a company
and leave it at that.  Linux is capable of working the same way.
First time through, I recommend making things as simple as possible.

I think we were making different assumptions about what the box
was going to do.

Bob Styma