E-mail - clients & transporters

[Geoff Shang]

Hi:

This is how I configure fetchmail.  Other people may do other things, this
is just what I do and it works for me.

I make a file in my home directory called .fetchmailrc (note the
leading dot) which looks a bit like this?

set daemon 300
poll fox.uq.net.au with protocol pop3:
	username zzgshang
	password MineToKnowAndYoursToFindOut
	fetchall, nokeep

There's quite a deal more you can put in here and you can get blinded with
science by reading 'man fetchmail', but this does me fine.  I'll briefly
explain everything here.  "set daemon 300" tells fetchmail to run in daemon
mode and to poll every 300 seconds (5 minutes).  "poll fox.uq.net.au" means
to poll the pop3 server where your mail is being stored.  "with" is
included for clarity and is completely ignored.  "protocol pop3" is pretty
self-explanatory.  Fetchmail can do a number of protocols, so it's good to
tell it which one to use.  "user" and "password" are again, pretty
obvious.  I'm not 100% sure about the meaning of
"fetchall".  "nokeep" means to delete mail from the server.  You might want
to set this to "keep" initially until you verify that it's all working
properly, in order to avoid losing mail.

So make this .fetchmailrc file and save it in your home directory.  Make
sure it's read/writeable only by you.  Best way to do this is to type:

chmod 600 .fetchmailrc

Oh before I go on, you should handle all your mail as a user.  In fact, you
should do as much as possible as a normal user, not as root.  Anyway, now
you've made this file in your home directory, you want to know if it's
going to work.  Type "fetchmail -V" (note the capital V) and you should get
a summary of what your file does.  It should look something like this:

This is fetchmail release 5.3.3+NTLM+SDPS+NLS
Linux data 2.2.18 #4 Thu Jan 4 00:31:21 EST 2001 i586 unknown
Taking options from command line and /home/geoff/.fetchmailrc
Poll interval is 300 seconds
Idfile is /home/geoff/.fetchids
Fetchmail will forward misaddressed multidrop messages to geoff.
Options for retrieving from zzgshang at fox.uq.net.au:
  True name of server is fox.uq.net.au.
  Protocol is POP3.
  Server nonresponse timeout is 300 seconds (default).
  Default mailbox selected.
  All messages will be retrieved (--all on).
  Fetched messages will not be kept on the server (--keep off).
  Old messages will not be flushed before message retrieval (--flush off).
  Rewrite of server-local addresses is enabled (--norewrite off).
  Carriage-return stripping is disabled (stripcr off).
  Carriage-return forcing is disabled (forcecr off).
  Interpretation of Content-Transfer-Encoding is enabled (pass8bits off).
  MIME decoding is disabled (mimedecode off).
  Idle after poll is disabled (idle off).
  Nonempty Status lines will be kept (dropstatus off)
  Messages will be SMTP-forwarded to: localhost (default)
  Recognized listener spam block responses are: 571 550 501 554
  Single-drop mode: 1 local name(s) recognized.
  No UIDs saved from this host.

As you can see, it's pretty clear about what's going to happen.  This is a
good way to find syntax errors in the file, as it should complain about
these at this stage.

Next, the thing to do is to try it.  If you're brave, you might just want
to type "fetchmail" and hold your breath.  If you actually want to see what
it's doing, real useful for when it doesn't work, type:

fetchmail -Nv

N or --nodetatch tells it not to background itself.  -v tells fetchmail to
tell you what it's doing.  This will result in a *lot* of output, but you
will be able to see what is going on.  If it all seems fine, wait until
fetchmail goes to sleep, hit control-C, then just run fetchmail without any
parameters for it to go about its business without disturbing you.  Note
that you will want to change "keep" to "nokeep" if you did this earlier,
otherwise mail will pile up on your ISP until your mailbox there gets full.

OK, now it's working, I'll finish with a short usage guide.

Fetchmail (on its own): First time it's run, will launch the fetchmail
daemon and print nothing.  You need to do this every time you boot the
machine otherwise you won't get mail.  After you've done this, fetchmail
will keep trying to retrieve mail every xxx seconds, even if you're offline
or your user account is not actually logged in.  If you type
"fetchmail" later, it will immediately check for mail, regardless of how
long it has been since it last checked.  It will inform you that an
existing fetchmail has been awakened.

fetchmail -q: Terminates a running fetchmail daemon.  To restart it, type
"fetchmail" again.

Good luck!

Geoff.