[ale] Fetchmail

[John Mills]

Jim -

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005, Jim Philips wrote:

> I have two users on this box: my wife and me. If I set up Fetchmail to pick up 
> mail from Speedfactory, it only appends mail to the queue belonging to the 
> user who invoked Fetchmail, i.e. if root invoked Fetchmail, all retrieved 
> mail ends up in root's mail queue. How do I get around this. In running 
> fetchmailconfig, I am asked the local name of the user whose mail is being 
> retrieved from Speedfactory's POP server. And the log below seems to show 
> that user being recognized. But everything still goes to root. Are there any 
> how-to's out there that explain how to do this? I've been looking for several 
> days.

I use Fetchmail to tap a couple of POP-servers, and it delivers the mail
to my spool (not root's).

I don't actively receive mail for other accounts, but I expect it would
handle more than one local addressee. Each POP-server/remote-user gets a
line defining the appropriate inquiry. More information in man pages, I'm 
sure. Note that mail to 'postmaster' is automatically forwarded to my user 
spool.

I start Fetchmail from rc.local with:
 /usr/local/sbin/fetchmail -f /etc/fetchmailrc.sys

My '/etc/fetchmailrc.sys' is:
*****************************************************************
# Configuration created <way back when> by fetchmailconf
set syslog
set postmaster "jmills"
set bouncemail
set properties ""
set daemon 300

poll pop.<isp_01>
	timeout 20 proto pop3 user <username_01> there with password
<password_01> is jmills at localhost here fetchall

poll mail.<isp_02>
	timeout 20 proto pop3 user <username_02> there with password 
<password_02> is jmills at localhost here fetchall
******************************************************************

For obvious reasons it is owned by root and its permissions are set to:
-r--------

HTH.

 - John Mills
   john.m.mills at alum.mit.edu