I'm wondering if there's a way to ask fetchmail to keep messages for a
certain amount of time only. Let's say I want fetchmail to only keep e-mails on the server which are no
more than 3 days old. I only want this for 1 account.

I got two accounts, now set up in KMail as two seperate servers (well same server but different accounts). For one account I set up "Destination Folder" as another folder than Inbox. How can I do the same thing using fetchmail?

And what is the flush thing?

Thanks.
Mark

PS.: Is there any way to run fetchmail run as deamon, which checks for mail every 30 seconds and which starts up with my pc?

hmm when I run fetchmail i get the following messages:
Why these errors (and why 2)? And how can I prevent em?

Please help. I need an answer - fast!!

help me im out of ideas

I think fetchmail only retrieves email from a server such as your isp and then forwards it to a local mailserver such as qmail. I am trying to figure this out myself but I think fetchmail requires a local mail server. I am trying to configure fetchmail --> Qmail --> SpamAssassin --> Evolution (or Kmail)

Fetchmail places your mail in /var/spool/mail. There is an email file which you can read with your email client.

Maybe it uses a local mailserver, I don't know.

how can we help you unless you show us your configuration files etc...? we're not psychic. and fetchmail is deisgned to run as a daemon in the first pace, that's it's main use. read the man page for details, and also try usnig fetchmailconf to configure it if you're having trouble writing your own configuration.

I am working on this right now. With qmail configured, I think it passes it to qmail. Maybe it defaults to /var/spool/mail when there is no mailserver listening at port 25. I have successfully used it to fetchmail from my isp and pass it to the qmail server and then to Evolution.

As to your question about leaving only messages in the server no older than 3 days. How about writing a cron job that deletes that file in var/spool/mail every 3 days.

I meant the mail getting deleted from the server after 3 days.

I only got one problem: when I set fetchmail to keep the mail on the server, it keeps on downloading it!

you are STILL not telling how you are configuring it.....

Me? With webmin.
I just set "keep mail on server" to yes.

fetchmail sends it to procmail which places mail in the mail spool. You can preconnect fetchmail with mailfilter for filtering out spam and then mailfilter will pass it on to procmail. AFAIK Qmail just handles the delivery (possibly the retrieval) but procmail does all of the sorting.

I was able to finally set up a Hotwayd --> Fetchmail --> Qmail ->SpamAssassin/Antivir -->Evolution.
My goal was to filter hotmail spam without opening up my gateway's port 25.

Thats cool. Could you explain how you did it?

And what about my keep-mail-on-server-problem??

The Howto is pretty big. I am working on it. I will post it here when its done.

http://cmisip.home.insightbb.com/

Regarding your keep-mail-on-server problem, I dont know, unless there is an option in fetchmail for that. Alternatively, you can run the setup like I did and host your own qmail server, point your email client to that, and maybe write a script that purges the Maildir of messages whose date of creation is greater than 3 days.