Re: [Fetchmail-users] Problem using fetchmail with a user

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

Am 16.10.2014 um 02:40 schrieb Ken Arromdee:
> I am running Mageia 4.0 which includes fetchmail 6.3.26.  The following is my
> entire /etc/fetchmailrc:
> 
>     set postmaster "arromdee"
>     set bouncemail
>     set no spambounce
>     set softbounce
>     set properties ""
>     poll mail.xxxxxx.net with proto POP3
>         user 'arromdee' password 'xxxxxxxx' mda "/bin/procmail -d arromdee"
> 
> I want to run fetchmail as a service, for which Mageia supplies a script in
> /etc/rc.d.  I want it to retrieve the mail from user arromdee on the remote
> system and deliver it to user arromdee on my local machine.
> 
> This /etc/fetchmailrc does work.  However, I want to be able to put the
> appropriate lines in my user-specific $HOME/.fetchmailrc, not in the global
> /etc/fetchmailrc.  How can I do this?  It doesn't seem like my user-specific
> .fetchmailrc is read at all (unless I run fetchmail as myself instead of as
> root).

True on many systems.  You absolutely need to make sure that fetchmail
is being started as "aromdee", not root.  Check if your boot scripts
support this -- on many systems, they do not.

You can however configure fetchmail for daemon mode and launch it from
cron - if it's already running, the second attempt to start it will
instead wake up the first instance.


Note that I advise against using procmail.  It has been unmaintained for
more than a decade and has design flaws that cause apparent mail "loss"
(which are not loss but in fact a fallback behaviour that causes
procmail to _misfile_ mail in error situations, and - albeit possible -
are hard to overcome by procmail recipes).