How to handle my own mail

I installed sendmail and pine and I could send emails to other people succesffly. However no matter what I try I cannot receive other people's email. The only messages sitting in my pine inbox are system notifications sent to root@knoppix.
Then I think the problem is that my mail is handled by someone else.
root@node02# host cluster.msu.com
cluster.msu.com has address 142.57.218.103
cluster.msu.com mail is handled by 10 pobox.msu.com.

I had no idea that pobox.msu.com was handling my mail, I didn't even know it existed . I couldn't ssh onto pobox.msu.com of course since I don't have password/account there. How to receive email on my own machine that is cluster.msu.com?

Thank you very much.

PS. All domain name/IP scramble for privacy.

Have your DNS administrator update (or remove) the MX record for cluster.msu.com. Mail will try to route to the A record if no MX record exists.

However, this will only work for mail sent to somebody@cluster.msu.com. If you want to receive mail for yourname@msu.com (for example) you'll need to POP/IMAP off your central mailserver, have your mail administrator configure a forward or virtusertable (to route yourname@msa.com to yourname@cluster.msa.com) or use fetchmail or similar.

Cheers,
ZB

thanks a lot, so there is no other way? In my school it takes $1000 to get a IP address from the bureaucracy of tech service. I don't want to contact tech service if there is a work around.

You can configure a "reply to" address when you send an SMTP mail, and if you use a address that works for you, that will work.