fetchmail
Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mail retrieval
and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP links
(such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports every remote-mail protocol
now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of
IMAP, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even support IPv6 and IPSEC.
As each message is retrieved, fetchmail delivers it to the local Mail Transfer Agent (e.g. sendmail, exim, postfix)
If your fetchmail configuration sets a local Mail Delivery Agent (e.g. procmail, maildrop), it will be used directly.
On laptops or home computers a full fledged email server is sort of overkill, and the combination of fetchmail and a MDA (I use procmail here) is quite easy to configure.
###Fetchmail
Fetchmail comes with fetchmailconf, a graphical front end to set up the
configuration in ~/.fetchmailrc.
Console junkies may prefer to get their editor ready and study http://www.fetchmail.info/fetchmail-man.html#31 to create it manually.
The most simple ~/.fetchmailrc would be (substitute <...> including the <> with your data):
poll <mail-provider>
proto <auto|pop3|imap|>
user "<your user name>"
pass "<MostSecret>"
is <local-user-name>
Other usefull keywords are:
-
ssl: use ssl -
keep: keep mail on server -
mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %s"pass mail to procmail for delivery to mailbox
###Procmail
Procmail is a mighty mail filtering, sorting and processing utility.
Using only one mailbox the most simple .procmailrc is:
MAILDIR=/var/mail
DEFAULT=/path/to/mailbox/The trailing slash is mandatory for maildir mailboxes.
Fetchmail can be run in demon mode as system service polling in regular intervalls.
I prefer to call fetchmail from the before-poll hook:
if (@last_fetchmail_time || Time.at(0)) < Time.now - 900
say "Running fetchmail..."
system "fetchmail > /dev/null 2>&1"
say "Done running fetchmail."
end
@last_fetchmail_time = Time.nowusing the following setting in ~/.sup/config.yaml:
:poll-intervall: 300