Is there one? I just want a simple app that uses a simple text file with rules that are used when logging into a remote POP3 server. I want to be able to delete files using specified criteria in the subject, sender, etc. It must run on the CLI without the need for GUI (unless text-based).

Does this exist?

This is not exactly what you are looking for but I have found this solution to work very well.

Install sendmail (or other) on your system. Install ClamAV and SpamAssasin. Download the latest MailScanner system and install. Once you configure it, all incoming email will be checked for virus's and spam would be filtered.

Just add in fetchmail to download your email to your local machine and dump it in a local account. Then have your email client check your local server for email.

That sounds like a very good idea. Now to put it to practice ...

Have you done this yourself? I'll have to look for fetchmail docs since I don't know where to begin. When accessing the e-mail that has been dumped to a local server account, how do I check it using a client? How would I go about implementing POP3? Thanks for your help.

Yes, I have done it for small business servers, web hosting servers, and on my personal workstation.

Fetchmail is one of the more easier tools to setup and one of the more usefull ones to use, in my opinion. I do not know what distro you are using, but RPM based stuff is very easy, and compiling by source is not hard either. The following links should get you started.

Fetchmail Homepage
Fetchmail Man Page

What I do is create a central fetchmail file, like:
/etc/fetchmail/.fetchmailrc or place .fetchmailrc in my /home/{username} directory. The actual file contents are described very clearly in the man page, buy looks something like this.

poll mail.isp.com proto pop3
user "johndoe24", with password abc123, is johndoe here;

This tells fetchmail to go to your isp's mail server, login with the username johndoe and provide password abc123, download all email using pop3 to local user acct johndoe.

You can start fetchmail as a daemon that checks at various intervals.
For Example: 'fetchmail -d 300 -f /etc/fetchmail/.fetchmailrc' starts the server in daemon mode, checks for new mail every 5 minutes, and calls the configuration information from /etc/fetchmail/.fetchmailrc. I also usually place the command line info in rc.local or similar depending what distro you are using, so that I don't have to remember each time I reboot.


You want to make sure that fetchmail is placing the email in the mail account of the user that you are logging in to the local machine as. From the local machine in a CLI situation, just open pine or mutt and it will open up the mail spool for that user which will give you the email that was downloaded. Going back to my example above, the email is being downloaded to a local account named johndoe, so in order to read that email, you will have to login as johndoe and open up a CLI mail client.


It is very straigh forward. I use Qpopper from Qualcomm. www.qpopper.org. Compile from the source, make install will place the needed binary in the correct location. Edit your inetd.conf or add a configuration for pop3 in your /etc/xinetd.d/ dir. Restart the inet service, and voila, pop3 server. Now if you are logging in locally to that machine, then you do not need pop3 server capability to read your email. But if you want to pop your server from another computer, you will need this.

The biggest thing to do first is to get your MTA configured, get ClamAV and SpamAssasin installed, and install MailScanner. These are not too terribly difficult, and will be a good learning project.

Have fun, and i'll try to be of any assistance to ya.

Everything works great! Now to implement SpamAssassin.

When specifying

.. as root... it gives me the error...

... I must run it as user "vern". How would I go about running the daemon as vern in rc.local?

I've got SpamAssasin working ... but I'm unsure about setting custom rules in /etc/mail/spamassassin/loca.cf. How would I reject e-mails from certain addresses? How would I reject mail with a specified string is found in the subject or body?

Without looking at any of the docs, I beleive fetchmail by default searches for .fetchmailrc in each home directory. So with that said, you should be able to just put "fetchmail -d 36000" in your rc.local file. This will then query all the individual .fetchmailrc's and place them in the desired mail accounts. Then all you would need to do is reboot the server, let fetchmail run its process and d/l email, Login as the normal user and check your mail.

One thing I didn't mention, .fetchmailrc should be chmodded to 0600 for proper access.

Another note is that if you d/l and install webmin, they make a fetchmail module for it that by default places the .fetchmailrc file in the /home directories of each user.

I think I've gotten everything working. Thank you very much for your help. All I have to do is tests to make sure that SpamAssassin is filtering mail correctly.