you type % telnet mail.whatever.com 25
it displays SMTP version blah blah ready.
you type HELP
it displays ...blah blah blah...
you type MAIL FROM: me@here.there.com
you type RCPT TO: you@mail.whatever.com
you type DATA
you type blah blah
you type .
it displays Mail received for spooling.
you type QUIT
And after that session, it will either spool it into a directory or
transfer it to another SMTP server.
So, let's say you have an account at direct.ca. All mail will go to
mail.direct.ca and will be kept there.
Note: You can easily fake Email!!
Next, you need to retrieve the mail. Of course, if you have a shell
account at mail.direct.ca, you can run "elm" or "pine" to read/retrieve
your mail. On the other hand, if you don't have a shell account, you can
retrieve it through the POP3 port at port#110. This is what it will look
like:
you type % telnet mail.whatever.com 110
it displays POP3 server ready for action.
you type USER me
it displays User me is welcome here. Password required.
you type PASS mysecretpasswd
it displays You have so-and-so mail waiting.
you type RETR 1
it displays Message 1
it displays ...blah blah blah...
you type DELE 1
it displays Message 1 deleted
you type QUIT
Of course, it's pretty tedious to have to type all of that out. So...they
have a popclient which will retrieve all your mail from the mail server
and put it into a file in your system. If you want to, I can send you
the popclient.tar.gz file.
> What I would like to do is have crond, connect to the ISP and
> grab incoming mail say 1-3 times a day, to minimize the amount of connect
> time. Is it possible to do this with a cheapo (dynamic IP) ISP account?
This isn't a problem at all. Just run "ppp-on; popclient; ppp-off" at,
say every three hours.