Re: [fetchmail-devel] why one person hates fetchmail

[Brian C. <B.C...@po...>]

On Thu, Jun 17, 2004 at 12:44:07PM -0400, Rob Funk quoted:
> For me, getting fetchmail to do this was far from trivial, but then I
> have to admit I do not find the fetchmail user interface (command line
> options and configuration file) to be at all intuitive, so I may not be
> understanding. I found that fetchmail did not seem to be happy about
> running multiple instances at once, about delivering directly to a
> Maildir, about having multiple independent POP accounts on the same
> host, and about running without a configuration file, all things which I
> think should just work right out of the box for a program called
> "fetchmail".

Yep, that's pretty fair. In particular, I have

poll pop3.mydomain.com  ... account 1 settings
skip pop3.mydomain.com  ... account 2 settings

and the only way I can make a poll of account 2 is by editing the config
file before polling.

The config language is a nightmare, and pretty illogical (e.g. settings
which I think should be settable globally and inherited by all accounts,
like 'ssl' for example, aren't; and working out which settings apply to
hosts and which to users has had me digging in the source code more than
once).

To be fair to fetchmail, in the olden days it *did* offer direct to mailbox
delivery, and it was ESR's decision that the design would be made much
cleaner by having delivery to a local SMTP daemon instead. Then slowly,
things crept back in like delivery via a pipe to procmail, delivery by
invoking an MTA command-line directly, delivery by LMTP... but things I
*actually* want, like delivery to a Maildir, aren't there.

Regards,

Brian.