Basic fetchmail questions

debest · 08-29-2003, 09:41 PM

OK, I know that there is an easy answer out there somewhere, but I need some hand-holding:

I'm using RedHat 9. I want to set up a home mail server to POP my family's 5 mailboxs from my ISP continuously, regardless of whether or not any users are logged in or not. The consensus of most posts that I've seen on home networks seems to be to use fetchmail for the first step of retrieving the mail before handing off to the MTA.

I wasn't sure if fetchmail was installed with RH9. Apparently it is: I typed "fetchmail" at a command prompt, and it responded that "no mailservers have been specified"

At a very basic level, where does fetchmail run? Does each user have to run fetchmail, controlled by their own ".fetchmailrc" file? Is there a way to have a "master" ".fetchmailrc" file that runs continuously, regardless of what users are logged in? If so, in what directory does it go? Does anyone have an example of how they did this? The documentation in the man page, the fetchmail homepage, and Red Hat's Reference Guide are quiet on these points.

Or am I completely out to lunch on what fetchmail is supposed to do? Please help!

Darren Best

Cyyb · 08-30-2003, 07:35 AM

you can set it up to do more than one account.

create a default fetchmailrc in /etc (note: no period in front). the file will have to be owned by whatever user your fetchmail daemon is going to run as. you will most likely want to make the permissions 700 on that file.

Code:

poll pop.yourisp.net proto pop3
        user "mailuser1", with password "mailpassword1", is "linuxuser1" here;

poll pop.yourisp.net proto pop3
        user "mailuser1", with password "mailpassword2", is "linxuser2" here;