[ale] Fetchmail

[Joe Steele]

On Tuesday, March 15, 2005 8:55 PM, Jim Philips wrote:
>
> I have two users on this box: my wife and me. If I set up Fetchmail to pick up
> mail from Speedfactory, it only appends mail to the queue belonging to the
> user who invoked Fetchmail, i.e. if root invoked Fetchmail, all retrieved
> mail ends up in root's mail queue. How do I get around this. In running
> fetchmailconfig, I am asked the local name of the user whose mail is being
> retrieved from Speedfactory's POP server. And the log below seems to show
> that user being recognized. 

It does?

[snip]
> fetchmail: POP3> USER jimmyc
> fetchmail: POP3< +OK
> fetchmail: POP3> PASS *
> fetchmail: POP3< +OK

Fetchmail retrieves mail from the pop-box for jimmyc

[snip]
> fetchmail: SMTP> MAIL FROM:<jphilips_2000 at yahoo.com> SIZE=1801
> fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.1.0 <jphilips_2000 at yahoo.com>... Sender ok
> fetchmail: SMTP> RCPT TO:<postmaster at localhost>

Fetchmail delivers jimmyc's mail to postmaster.  Typically fetchmail 
would not deliver to postmaster except as a last resort when the 
local user name is unrecognized.  However, the log shows no attempt 
to make delivery to any other name except postmaster.  

Configured properly, fetchmail is fully capable of being run by a 
single user for retrieving multiple users' mail.  For example, one 
could create a user 'mailservice' (doesn't need root privileges) that 
uses fetchmail in a cron job or in daemon mode with a ~/.fetchmailrc 
such as this:

defaults
proto pop3

poll <xyz>
via <pop.example.net>
timeout 30

user <pop-box-1>
pass <xxx>
to <local-user-1>

user <pop-box-2>
pass <xxx>
to <local-user-2>

user <pop-box-3>
pass <xxx>
to <local-user-3>

--Joe