
Read Yahoo! Mail from Any Email Client #56
Chapter 8, Desktop Programs
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The most important parts to configure are at the top of the file. Like many
other Linux configuration files, each option has the format
option_keyword =
setting
. For example, username = johnsmith sets the username option to
johnsmith. To get started, you need to set the username and password
options to your Yahoo! account settings (you don’t need to put these set-
tings in double quotes, as with other configuration files). It is also advisable
that you set
use-https = 1 to ensure secure communications between your
computer and the mail server.
The spool option is another important setting. This indicates where your
mail spool (the place where your mail is stored) is located on your Linux sys-
tem. Most distributions place this in a file with your account name inside
the /var/spool/mail/ directory. As an example, the user
bob would have his
mail spool at /var/spool/mail/bob. To check this, have a poke around /var/
spool/mail and see if the username exists in there—every user should have a
mail spool file. If you don’t have a mail spool (such as if your mail client
cannot read mail from a spool), you can have the mail stored in maildir for-
mat by adding a slash (/) to the spool setting (e.g., /var/spool/mail/); this
directory will contain the mailbox.
A variety of other options are in the configuration file, and each one