Hi Cheers, I'm about to give it a try. I wonder where I should put a copy of the file for root? I've setup an account for myself but haven't figured out how to allow ppp access as a user other than root. Gena gena at visson.freeserve.co.uk g.joyce at uclan.ac.uk http://www.visson.freeserve.co.uk Mobile Telephone Number 07951 196268 -----Original Message----- From: speakup-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:speakup-admin at braille.uwo.ca]On Behalf Of Geoff Shang Sent: 28 January 2001 07:07 To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca Subject: RE: E-mail - clients & transporters Hi: This is how I configure fetchmail. Other people may do other things, this is just what I do and it works for me. I make a file in my home directory called .fetchmailrc (note the leading dot) which looks a bit like this? set daemon 300 poll fox.uq.net.au with protocol pop3: username zzgshang password MineToKnowAndYoursToFindOut fetchall, nokeep There's quite a deal more you can put in here and you can get blinded with science by reading 'man fetchmail', but this does me fine. I'll briefly explain everything here. "set daemon 300" tells fetchmail to run in daemon mode and to poll every 300 seconds (5 minutes). "poll fox.uq.net.au" means to poll the pop3 server where your mail is being stored. "with" is included for clarity and is completely ignored. "protocol pop3" is pretty self-explanatory. Fetchmail can do a number of protocols, so it's good to tell it which one to use. "user" and "password" are again, pretty obvious. I'm not 100% sure about the meaning of "fetchall". "nokeep" means to delete mail from the server. You might want to set this to "keep" initially until you verify that it's all working properly, in order to avoid losing mail. So make this .fetchmailrc file and save it in your home directory. Make sure it's read/writeable only by you. Best way to do this is to type: chmod 600 .fetchmailrc Oh before I go on, you should handle all your mail as a user. In fact, you should do as much as possible as a normal user, not as root. Anyway, now you've made this file in your home directory, you want to know if it's going to work. Type "fetchmail -V" (note the capital V) and you should get a summary of what your file does. It should look something like this: This is fetchmail release 5.3.3+NTLM+SDPS+NLS Linux data 2.2.18 #4 Thu Jan 4 00:31:21 EST 2001 i586 unknown Taking options from command line and /home/geoff/.fetchmailrc Poll interval is 300 seconds Idfile is /home/geoff/.fetchids Fetchmail will forward misaddressed multidrop messages to geoff. Options for retrieving from zzgshang at fox.uq.net.au: True name of server is fox.uq.net.au. Protocol is POP3. Server nonresponse timeout is 300 seconds (default). Default mailbox selected. All messages will be retrieved (--all on). Fetched messages will not be kept on the server (--keep off). Old messages will not be flushed before message retrieval (--flush off). Rewrite of server-local addresses is enabled (--norewrite off). Carriage-return stripping is disabled (stripcr off). Carriage-return forcing is disabled (forcecr off). Interpretation of Content-Transfer-Encoding is enabled (pass8bits off). MIME decoding is disabled (mimedecode off). Idle after poll is disabled (idle off). Nonempty Status lines will be kept (dropstatus off) Messages will be SMTP-forwarded to: localhost (default) Recognized listener spam block responses are: 571 550 501 554 Single-drop mode: 1 local name(s) recognized. No UIDs saved from this host. As you can see, it's pretty clear about what's going to happen. This is a good way to find syntax errors in the file, as it should complain about these at this stage. Next, the thing to do is to try it. If you're brave, you might just want to type "fetchmail" and hold your breath. If you actually want to see what it's doing, real useful for when it doesn't work, type: fetchmail -Nv N or --nodetatch tells it not to background itself. -v tells fetchmail to tell you what it's doing. This will result in a *lot* of output, but you will be able to see what is going on. If it all seems fine, wait until fetchmail goes to sleep, hit control-C, then just run fetchmail without any parameters for it to go about its business without disturbing you. Note that you will want to change "keep" to "nokeep" if you did this earlier, otherwise mail will pile up on your ISP until your mailbox there gets full. OK, now it's working, I'll finish with a short usage guide. Fetchmail (on its own): First time it's run, will launch the fetchmail daemon and print nothing. You need to do this every time you boot the machine otherwise you won't get mail. After you've done this, fetchmail will keep trying to retrieve mail every xxx seconds, even if you're offline or your user account is not actually logged in. If you type "fetchmail" later, it will immediately check for mail, regardless of how long it has been since it last checked. It will inform you that an existing fetchmail has been awakened. fetchmail -q: Terminates a running fetchmail daemon. To restart it, type "fetchmail" again. Good luck! Geoff. _______________________________________________ Speakup mailing list Speakup at braille.uwo.ca http://speech.braille.uwo.ca/mailman/listinfo/speakup
