qpopper, lockfile-progs, and another random non-POP mail fetching solution

[Daniel Jacobowitz <drow+@cs.cmu.edu>]

I was playing around this morning and used lockfile-progs to add a new
mode of operation to qpopper - non-network.

Basically, it allows the user to just say 'in.qpopper' at a prompt and
start a POP3 session; any password is accepted, any username other
than his own is refused, the temporary mail drop is in his home
directory instead of /var/mail, and an external setgid program is used
for locking.

In addition, I patched lockfile-progs a bit (one bug and one feature;
not locking an arbitrary user's mail spool and optionally not retrying
the lock if the first time fails).  When I have another few minutes to
work on this it will make lockfile-progs accept an argument for the
number of retries, which is the right solution anyway.

What this boils down to is a way to retrieve mail by tunnelling
fetchmail over ssh - it might require tweaking fetchmail a bit, I'm not
sure, as I've not tried yet.

Does this sound useful?  Worth including in the qpopper package?


Also, is there a (licence-related?) reason that we are still at a
security-patched qpopper 2.3 instead of 2.53?

Dan