dawgiestyle

01/23/05: Fetchmail For Easier Desktop Administration

My latest project at work involves the use of MS Exchange with the pop3 connector to retrieve mail from external mailboxes. This made me want to try out Fetchmail, which does exactly that. Of course, my home mail server of choice is Qmail, not Exchange.

I'm sure there are many people like myself who have 5 or 6 seperate email accounts set up in their preferred mail client. While this is no big deal, it can be quite a hassle to remember/re-enter all the account information after a fresh desktop install. Wouldn't it be much easier to set up one account that includes mail from all others? A simple use of message filters can then seperate the mail as it arrives.

So I went once again to the trusty FreeBSD ports collection on my fileserver and installed the Fetchmail port. A quick scan through the man page was all I needed to find the syntax for my ~/.fetchmailrc file. I opted to set up a cron job to poll the pop3 servers every 5 minutes rather than use daemon mode. My reason for this being that there may potentially be other people in the household using my fetchmail system who have no *nix experience. My understanding of the man page is that each user needs to have their own Fetchmail daemon process running, and I'm not quite sure how to achieve that (I am open to suggestions). Anyway, I thought it would be easy enough to add a cron job for anybody using the system, and it seems to be working ok so far.

Now, the next time I set up my mail client, I only have to set up my local server pop3 account and it will get all my other mail to me. Setting up a few message filters can be much easier than remembering passwords I rarely use.

Another advantage of this setup is if my internet access goes down sometime in the middle of the night for any length of time, I know that I have recieved all email up to about 5 minutes before it went down.

I really should start looking at disk redundancy for that server.