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

[Perry H. <phu...@be...>]

> ... 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.

I thought the cure for that sort of thing was to run two (or more)
instances of fetchmail, each with a different setting of FETCHMAILHOME.

> 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).

I haven't been reduced to digging in the source, but have had some
trial and error finding out whether certain settings are "host" or
"user".  This is largely a matter of incomplete documentation :(

> 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.

As long as we have the ability to hand off to a specified agent,
I would think it preferable -- at least, more modular -- to use a
different external agent for each type of local mail store, rather
than to try to amalgamate the lot of them into fetchmail.  You can
have fetchmail invoke the same local delivery program that sendmail
would use to write to a maildir.