Re: How to automate email retrieval

[Tobias Diedrich <ranma@example.com>]

Jean-Christian Imbeault wrote:

> >Yup.  Do something like `fetchmail -d 120'.
>
> I've gotten fetchmail to work as a daemon, but I don't think this means it
> gets restarted when the machine reboots or keep going when you logout or
> even that it restarts itself it it dies for some reason.

1. It keeps going when you logout
2. If it dies it does not restart
3. You have to restart it on reboot

> I'm new to linux sysadmin and I'm just wondering what is the "proper" way of
> getting fetchmail to always be up and running as a deamon. If it to ask each
> user to make a cron job or is there some way I can do this as root and have
> fetchmail run system wide for each user?

At first I had a normal modem/isdn dialup account. So to automatically
fetch mail for my brother and me I made a script like this:
#!/bin/sh
while true; do
  fetchmail
  sleep 10m
done
This was started in /etc/ppp/ip-up with startproc and killed in
/etc/ppp/ip-down with killproc.

In this example fetchmail is being called as root and /root/.fetchmailrc
was configured to fetch mail from both mail-accounts and deliver it to two
local users.

Problem here was that sometimes one of the mailservers was kinda slow and
you had to be root to change account data. (Of course this doesn't matter
much with only to users)

I then modified this script to start one fetchmail for each user with both
running simultaneously.

Then I discovered the daemon option and tried out that one (starting
fetchmail for each user as a daemon in ip-up and killing it in ip-down).

Now I have a ADSL-flatrate, so I am forwarding my mail to my system
instead of polling mail with fetchmail.

What approach you want to use depends on your internet connection type,
the number of users on your system and which you like most ^_-

-- Tobias