Re: How to automate email retrieval

[shimpei@example.com]

> This is my first posting to this list so please excuse me if it's off topic 
> or too simple ...
> 
> I'm trying to automate mail retrieval on my Red Hat linux 6.2 machine from 
> my ISP's POP server. Could anyone point me to some documentation on how to 
> do this?
> 
> Ideally I would like to download all the emails and then send then to a 
> script for processing.

The default software for POP mail retrieval on Linux is fetchmail. Do

   man fetchmail

to find out how to set it up. I believe RH6.2 also had a GUI utility called
fetchmailconf that will write the config file for you. Whatever you do,
don't leave out the "don't delete mail afterwards" option until you're sure
everything is working, unless you like losing mail!

Once you get fetchmail to work, you need to make it run automatically.
fetchmail isn't capable of running itself as a daemon (background process),
so you need to tell the "cron" daemon to invoke it every so often.
To find out how, do

   man cron
   man crontab

You might also get help from some documents in the /usr/doc/HOWTO/ directory,
but I can't tell you for sure since I'm not on a Linux machine right now.

Shimpei.