fetchmail, mutt and crontab


Subject: fetchmail, mutt and crontab
From: Reid Ellis (rae@tnir.mef.org)
Date: Wed Sep 08 1999 - 06:58:41 MDT


> First thing, I have given up using GUI program mail shite and decided to go
> with a PINE/FETCHMAIL combo (wouldn't mind hearing what people like to combine
> with FETCHMAIL though... does PINE suck? I use it at work and it is pretty
> cool)...

I use fetchmail, but not Pine. I use mutt instead. <http://www.mutt.org/>
There is an rpm with the Yellow Dog distro, or online at my favorite mirror:

<ftp://ftp.cso.uiuc.edu/pub/systems/linux/yellowdog/champion-1.1/ppc/RedHat/RPMS/mutt-0.95.5us-2.ppc.rpm>

[it's my favorite because my cablemodem manages 5 Mbps downloads from it :)]

> Thing is, I don't want to manually invoke fetchmail all the time... I want
> to set up my ".fetchmailrc" with all sorts of shit in it (poll delays,
> auto invokes and shit) and I want to use fetchmailconf to do it (or
> someone can send me an example file I can learn from it - but would prefer
> fetchmailconf so I can check out all the options).

Don't know fetchmailconf. Here's my ~/.fetchmailrc for what it's worth
[replacing real passwords with <passwd> of course:

        poll mail.mgisoft.com user reide password <passwd>
        poll mail.interlog.com password <passwd>
        poll netmail.home.com protocol pop3 user clith password <passwd>

from this you can deduce that I use the following email accounts:
        reide@mgisoft.com
        rae@interlog.com
        clith@home.com
because my account on tnir is 'rae' and fetchmail uses the current account
name by default unless specified otherwise. and here is a part of my
~/.crontab that boots up fetchmail every now and again:

        # suck down new mail every 1/2 hour
        0,30 * * * * /usr/bin/fetchmail -s
        # suck down new mail every 15 minutes during the day
        15,45 8-18 * * * /usr/bin/fetchmail -s

To get the crontab rolling I say "crontab ~/.crontab" and it's off and
running. "man crontab" for more info. cron is your friend. Burmashave. The
file name "~/.crontab" is a personal tradition. You could call it "Stuff to
run every now anf again" if you wanted [spaces and all].

Reid



This archive was generated by hypermail 2a24 : Fri Oct 01 1999 - 16:13:43 MDT