Recap of Fetchmail (from Yesterday and Friday)

7 May 2002

      Hi, everyone,
Someone asked me to recap the string that was my fetchmail problem for the 
benefit of others, and that's totally reasonable. 

Last  Friday, I asked this:

Hi,
I'm looking through the suse docs and one of them is a script which checks 
mail via fetchmail on a regular basis.

To make sure that things were generally working and configured right, I set up 
a file /root/.fetchmailrc and ran it and it worked like a charm.

Now I get to the script. It says this:

case "$1" in
    start)
        echo -n "Starting fetchmail-daemon"
        /usr/bin/fetchmail -d 900 -a -f /etc/fetchmailrc -L /var/log/fetchmail 
2>&1 || return=$rc_failed
        echo -e "$return"
        ;;
    stop)
        echo -n "Shutting down fetchmail-daemon"
        /usr/bin/fetchmail -quit || return=$rc_failed
        echo -e "$return"
        ;;
    *)
        echo "Usage: $0 {start|stop}"
        exit 1
esac
exit 0

And then it says this:

The file to which the -f option points must be the .fetchmailrc of the user 
who
has to fetch the mail.

Hmmm. I suppose I'm asking is root the user who has to fetch the mail?

Right now it has me at /root/.fetchmailrc, bu the script which suse provides 
asks me to "edit /etc/fetchmailrc" (I suppose with the same information about 
users, passwords and procmail) - but is that being run as ROOT or as USER?

(You all know that the next questions will be about procmail and spastic!!)

On Monday, Jaakko said, 

Hi

I have working fetchmail, and all I have is:

In my /etc/rc.d/boot.local:
        /usr/bin/fetchmail -f /etc/fetchmailrc

and in /etc/fetchmail I have:
        poll xxx.fi
        proto pop3
        user "my_login"
        pass "my_pass"
        is jaska
        keep

So, in boot the boot.local starts the daemon, and it looks for 
/etc/fetchmailrc.

Then Anders wrote,

On Monday 06 May 2002 18:36, Nick Selby wrote:
...
The daemon is running (I see it shutdown on reboot)
OK, so what's the problem? Isn't it fetching the mail?
...
Is the 300  in  /usr/bin/fetchmail -d 300 -a -f /etc/fetchmailrc
the time in seconds between pollling of the mail server? Ihope?
Yup, that's exactly what it is.

Then I wrote back to Anders off list saying that I had rechecked everything 
and it was working.  It seems that the problem was that the Daemon was 
working, but I wasn't checking my mail properly!!

Anders wrote, 

On Monday 06 May 2002 18:49, you wrote:
...
But did I do everything right up there?
Did you do "rcfetchmail start" (or restart, if you didn't stop it before 
editing the config)?

Try running (as root) fetchmail -f /etc/fetchmailrc from the prompt, just to 
see if there are any error messages

Here's the poll line from my fetchmailrc

poll naomi
       user 'andjoh' there with password 'xxxxxxx' is 'andjoh' here
...
Thanks, Anders. I owe you many beers in Munich.
:) I may take you up on that

//Anders

Thanks everyone. 

Nick