Re: [fetchmail-users] Can fetchmail leave email on the POP3 srever for (say) 10 days?

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

"Richard" <rch...@aa...> writes:

> I have Centos 4.4 all up to date. Being a recently reformed Windows Sys
> Admin - I tend to manage centos mostly with Webmin - though I also use the
> Gnome interface through nx. I try to avoid the command line stuff where
> possible.

I find command-line interfaces more efficient in the long run -- even if
I don't suggest to start learning the modal vi editor first, pico, nano
or joe are user-friendly alternatives.

And the command-line interface is standard - in contrast to the various
incarnations of web interfaces - so there are more people around who are
able to support the former.

> The Webmin interface for configuring fetchmial allows me to specify whether
> or not to leave the email items on the POP3 server after downloading them.
> As far as I can see there is no way to specify to leave them there for (say)
> 10 days then delete them. Most POP clients support this behaviour. (Outlook
> & Outlook express certainly do)

Outlook & express are by no means setting standards -- with
long-standing serious MIME and quoting bugs still unfixed in Outlook 11
that Microsoft documented in the KB in the days of Outlook Express 4 a
decade ago...

Having said that, fetchmail up to and including 6.3.X versions do not
have such a feature yet, but the next major spin (which might be called
6.4, 6.5 or 7.0 eventually) might.

This has mostly historical reasons: ESR wanted to keep this feature out
and also (not sure if it's related) loathed touching client-side
"message seen" tracking like a toothache -- and I wanted to offer the
many dozens of 6.3.X fixes as painlessly and as soon as possible to
6.2.X users - which required leaving a few shortcomings as they were in
2003 and 2004, the days of ESR's last fetchmail release, 6.2.5, and I
can't work full-time on fetchmail and am currently the only active
developer.

For the nonce, check the contrib/ directory of recent fetchmail versions
and see if you can find stuff that helps you -- although I'm not able to
support what's in there unless I've personally written it.

There is a MySQL/Tcl/Expect based solution appearing in fetchmail
6.3.8's contrib/ directory (already included in -rc1, check the mailing
list archives for the announcement).

If you can't be bothered to do that, but your CentOS 4.4 has Python 2.4
or newer as the default Python install, getmail 4 by Charles Cazabon
might be an alternative that has this feature, but its resistance
against eavesdroppers and man-in-the-middle attacks is largely dependent
on the behavior of Python libraries and not always clear.

> Can anyone tell me whether this can be done - and if so - is it a limitation
> of the webmin interface which prevents me from specifying this?

Not up to and including fetchmail 6.3.X.

> I think Webmin allows me to run a command before and/or after
> downloading emails.  Perhaps I can achieve what I want this way?

Yes, you can - provided that command or script removes messages that
have arrived N days. :-)

> If I revert to editing a conf file - will that interfere with webmin's
> control of the conf file?

That depends on Webmin, of which I know naught beyond its bare existence.

> I would like to do this so that there is a copy of new emails somewhere if
> the Centos machine hard disk dies.

If you don't want to do this at an application level, but on a file
system level, look for DRBD (essentially RAID across the network in
Linux) - requires a second computer with fast disks, preferably
off-site, and a fast network connection.

-- 
Matthias Andree