This seems like it should be straightforward enough, but I've found there can be alot of solutions to a question with Linux.
I am a dial-up internet user at home. I connect using the Network Device Controller and get my email for all my accounts with Evolution. I am running FC2. I run a mediocre web site that allows customer responses and sell the occasional trinket on eBay. I don't run home and check my email everyday - it can be days at a time. This almost never matters because no one contacts me. However, lately I've had some interest at work in my site and it's possible traffic might pick up.
What I wanted to do was set my PC to dial my ISP once a day (or more), pick up any email, filter my email, forward copies to my cell phone that meet certain requirements, and hang-up. This way if I really ever get some customer email, I'll not miss it. Evolution already vFolders my website email seperate from my personal email and I could filter for eBay easy enough, but Evolution doesn't appear to have "forwarding" as an filtering option. Not to mention that neither Evolution nor NDC appear to have any scripting or command line switches avaible from the documentation I've seen so far.
So far the tools I seem to need to learn to accomplish this might be cron, wvdial, and something for the email. I don't really feel much like changing how I view all my email, so my plan isn't to dump Evolution for reading and responding - I have no beef with it. Ultimately, I don't want this service to interfere with day - to - day email use. I want it to run in the background and leave the email on the server. I just want to be tipped off when there is something important to run and download. Thanks in advance.

trine.

you'd want fetchmail to grab the email. this can run as a scheduled daemon in it's own right, so wouldn't want a cron job to go with it. but then unless you're going to run something like diald http://diald.sourceforge.net/ then you'll need to manage the dial-up too.. in which case you'd be back to cron, and using fetchmail in it's one-shot mode. just look through the fetchmail docs for details.

I took a look at both Fetchmail and Diald. First, I think I'll have to use Cron anyways, because I need to control the time of day the dial-up occurs. Fetchmail's daemon runs on the "seconds since the last connection" schedule which could have unintended results. Fetchmail does sound perfect for grabbing a specific address' email and forwarding all of it to another address, but I didn't see any filtering possibilities in the docs. This would work for one address of mine, but if I can pull this off, I'd love to try sending a few specific emails for my main address as well. Procmail looked promising, but very tedious. I nosed around Sourceforge and found something called Sortmail. Far as I can tell, it's Fetchmail and Procmail's simpler child. Fetches, sorts, sends. Anyone ever heard of it? No mention of it on LQ, but it is not new.

Next is Diald. I'm not sure I want to be continuously running a proxy just for the convenience of dialing out. Weird enough though, I haven't found alot of other solutions either. Lotsa PPP dialers out there, but few dial from the command line and fewer still appear to hang up on their own or through the command line. I already have wvdial, which will start from the command line, but it's unclear to me how I would stop it. I want this all to start up and finish with no intervention on my part. Dialers, anyone?

thanks, trine.