Downloading the Mail

I use Fetchmail for this. I just installed the rpm from the RedHat CD to get it.

The manual page is pretty good, but if you're new at LINUX some things will seem cryptic. To get you started, here's my .fetchmailrc:

poll world.std.com proto pop3 user lconrad there is lconrad@serpent.laymusic.local here password xxxxx
forcecr

The forcecr line is allegedly necessary for qmail. It doesn't seem to break sendmail.

And here's the line I have in my /etc/ppp/ip-up.local file for executing fetchmail every time I establish a ppp connection to my isp:

fetchmail -a -v --syslog -d 59

It works pretty well. When it doesn't, it isn't really informative with the error messages -- it took me a while to figure out what was wrong when my root partition filled up and I suddenly stopped getting mail.

---

Last modified: 2002-06-29 11:12, 2007
www.laymusic.org/fetchmail.html