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Today, email is an important part of many people’s life. As there are many options as to how to set it up, and as having it set up correctly is important for some Ubuntu utilities, we will try to cover the basics in this section.
There are three main functions that make up an e-mail system. First there is the Mail User Agent (MUA) which is the program a user actually uses to compose and read mails. Then there is the Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) that takes care of transferring messages from one computer to another. And last there is the Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) that takes care of delivering incoming mail to the user’s inbox.
These three functions can be performed by separate programs, but they can also be combined in one or two programs. It is also possible to have different programs handle these functions for different types of mail.
On Linux and Unix systems mutt is historically a very popular MUA. Like most traditional Linux programs it is text based. It is often used in combination with exim or sendmail as MTA and procmail as MDA.
8.5.1. Default E-Mail Configuration