Wasn't sure if this was the right forum, but here goes anyway.

I'm looking for a program, that can be run every 5/10 minutes, to pull mail from my ISP's POP server. But, all it should do, is hold that mail, so that another mail application, running on another machine, can then connect to retrieve the mail.

Does that make sense.

Cheers.

just to clarify you want something similar in function to exchange
is that correct?

I guess so, yes.

The problem I'm trying to solve is this. The ISP my wife connects to for mail, has a habit of "suspending" their service every morning, at around 2am. She uses Outlook for mail, and it complains that it can't connect. Which is fine, except it throws up a dialog box, that has to be manually dismissed. So, until she logs on, and does that, all mail retrieval is stopped. Now, she only has a small mailbox, and also doesn't always check every day, so she's had issues with that box becoming full. Somehow her address has got on a couple of high volume spam lists, but she doesn't want to change addresses. Nor does she want to switch from Outlook.

So, what I was thinking of, was running something on my server, which runs 24x7, that would pick up her mail, on a regular basis, but wouldn't complain about the outages, just keep trying. Then I could configure her Outlook, to pick up the mail from my server, instead of the ISP.

Does that make it clearer.

Cheers.

In continuing to search about this, I found an article on a mailing list archive, that implied this was possible. It suggested the following:

fetchmail->procmail->mailbox->pop3server

Is this really feasible. And what are the possible drawbacks.

Cheers.

I don't see a lot of drawbacks there. Looking at man fetchmail this should work fine. I use fetchmail on some accounts, but connect to postfix rather than procmail because I run a full mail server as well. Have a look at Dovecot as a possible pop server, as it's very simple to set up.

Yes it's feasible. I've used it to download mail from an ISP and don't remember it as being any more or less secure than just connecting directly to the ISP.

It's been a while since I've had to configure something like that, but from memory fetchmail downloads the mail and connects to the MTA on port 25 of the box it is running on - it might be sendmail or something else. If nothing is listening on port 25 it can be configured to hand over to an MDA (ie procmail).