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

[Rob F. <rf...@fu...>]

Perry Hutchison wrote:
> > 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.

You must admit, though, that that's a bit of an ugly hack.

> > 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 :(

Yeah, one big thing that we need to do is fix the documentation to separate 
the categories of settings.

Ideally I'd love to figure out a way to fix the config language to make 
this more explicit, but that has a lot of problems.  Fixing the docs would 
go a long way.

> > 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.

You could have procmail deliver to a maildir.

> 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.

True.  On the other hand....
ESR would hate the idea, but I actually think that maildir is a decent 
candidate for inclusion because it doesn't have the locking headaches that 
other formats have.

Of course, I was the one who successfully fought to get mda support put 
back into fetchmail after ESR removed it way back when.
-- 
==============================|   "A microscope locked in on one point
 Rob Funk <rf...@fu...> |Never sees what kind of room that it's in"
 http://www.funknet.net/rfunk |    -- Chris Mars, "Stuck in Rewind"