Re: [Fetchmail-users] Earthlink changed its incoming server names

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

Am 08.06.21 um 02:33 schrieb Michael Burgoon:
> It appears that EarthLink is having some serious technical problems. I’m getting all sorts of errors from all my devices that, up to now, have had no issues. Everything works fine for a couple days, then it all goes south.
>
> I’m thinking that my original problem was related to their issues. I went back and put -U back and it worked fine.  Sorry to bother you with someone else’s problem.

No worries, I however found it necessary to not confuse readers of the
mailing list archives with debugging that went into a dead end because
the real cause was a server-side issue - and the -U or --uidl thing
can't manifest if you have login troubles because fetchmail does not get
to the point where it might probe LAST, UIDL, or thereabouts, at all.

> However, please tell me how to run fetch mail at startup under an id other than root. There’s not a lot I can do about pop’s lack of security. They support a pop, but that’s it, they want you to use IMAP where they support SSL. Can fetchmail be used with IMAP, and still delete the emails on the server when it retrieves them?

I recall this was some embedded system, NAS or thereabouts? I am
unfamiliar with their operating systems.

How you do what you want depends a bit on the operating system
facilities and how you forward mail to your regular user.

If you have regular user accounts such as mike, michael or mburgoon on
your system running fetchmail, and you have an SMTP or LMTP setup to
inject mail into, just set fetchmail up for the user by means of
.fetchmailrc and possibly copy the root user's .fetchids to the user and
change ownership of the file, and make sure you have something that
starts fetchmail on boot or after crashes. Since you use daemon mode, a
cronjob would be fine, since if fetchmail were already running you'd
just wake the existing instance and otherwise launch a new one.

Regards,
Matthias