ItsCurly

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Hi,
I have started tinkering around with mail on a hosted linux (think its red hat enterprise) account. I have root access to everything except modifying the kernel.

Having configured fetchmail it seems to be working ok, it says its downloaded messages, but I am not sure where its likely to have put them, or if there is a setting in fetchmail where it tells it where to put my mail. I have checked /var/spool/mail and /var/mail as well as /home/user1/mail and /home/user1/Mail too.

Another question, I have installed mutt also, and it seems to want to access /var/spool/mail/root even though I am not using the root account. I have added /var/spool/mail/root but of course mutt is showing no messages.

I know I can edit the muttrc file but I don't know what to put there, because I don't know for sure where my mail is being downloaded. Ideally I would like it in my home directory somewhere.

Hope you can help,
Curly

acid_kewpie

fetchmail doesn't deliver mail, only fetch it. once it's pulled back to the local machine, it's sent through the sendmail command, and whatever is providing that tool (obviously assumed to be sendmail, but all MTA's, postfix, qmail etc... will provide the same program name for reasons like this one)

dive

You might also have procmail running, in which case you need to look in ~/.procmailrc or make one if not there.

ItsCurly

OK, I think I understand that, I was following a tutorial from lifehacker which didn't exactly make it clear. Before I get too into it, its probably better explaining what I want to do, maybe there's a far easier way to achieve this.

All I want to do is to be able to download my POP3 mail, and view it in something like mutt. I have two mail accounts, both POP3, nothing in the domain or anything like that, and I do not need to run a mail server. I have an smtp server available to for outgoing mail. Do I need to go the Postfix / Sendmail route, as it seems a bit over the top for what I am trying to do?

dive

Try procmail.

ItsCurly

Short but sweet (and all I needed to know) response! Procmail seems to be working ok as an MDA as long as fetchmail is told to use procmail. I specified a directory, mail is being received. Set .muttrc to check that folder for messages.

One slight problem, and one question, if I may.

Mutt still tries to load /var/spool/mail/root when opened. I can then change to the folder I want by pressing 'C' to change to the correct folder which then displays my messages just fine. How can I get mutt to open the correct folder when I open it rather than me switching from /var/spool/mail/root all the time?

Not too familiar with cron jobs, I have one to run fetchmail but I need to edit it to instead run fetchmail with procmail (fetchmail -m "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T".) How would I do this?

Thanks for your patience.

dive

1) Invoke mutt using the -f option to make it go straight to a folder. You can even make an alias:

alias mutt='mutt -f ~/mail/dave'

2a) Instead of setting up cron, you can set fetchmail to poll for new mail every so many seconds. In .fetchmailrc:

set daemon 300

Polls every 5 minutes.

2b) You don't need to tell fetchmail to use procmail. It should do so automatically.

I recommend reading through:
man mutt
man fetchmail
man procmail
man procmailrc

I would also recommend installing spamassassin as it works very well with procmail.

andrew.46

Hi,

Sounds like you are almost there:

If you use procmail, and this is a great option, you should have the following in your ~/.fetchmailrc:

And of course check the path to your own procmail.

It will only try to access this folder if told to do so :-) There are several ways to set your default mailbox. To see what is currently set run the following:

If you need to alter it you can add it to ~/.bashrc as:
or set it in your ~/.muttrc as:

This is arguably the best place to deliver the mail.

My usual practice is to have the mail delivered to /var/spool/mail/username but have procmail sort messages to $HOME/mail. This can be done by adding the following to ~/.procmailrc:

Perhaps you would benefit from reading through a page that deals with most of this, but with a gmail angle:

http://www.andrews-corner.org/mutt.html

All the very best,

Andrew