massive fetchmail frustration

[Britton <fsblk@aurora.alaska.edu>]

Fetchmail has me completely baffled.  I think is all the convenient noise
language that has been introduced into the config file.  Here is my 
situation:
  
I have an account on my homemachine with usernam bkerin.  My account name
on my ISP is fsblk.  I would like to be able to have all mail downloaded
to my home machine but preserved on the remove machine until the next time
fetchmail is run.  The flush options appears to be intended for something
like this.  I have tried to many configurations to relate them all, but
the one that appears to come closest to working and represent the least
radical interpretation of the somewhat obscure man page looks like this: 

poll aurora.alaska.edu             \
protocol IMAP                      \
timeout 200                        \
user fsblk is bkerin               \
pass fantasy                       \
fetchall                           \
keep 
  
With the keep in there so I don't lose my mail while experimenting.  What
happens when I run 'fetchmail' is this:

$ fetchmail
fetchmail: 70 messages at fsblk@aurora.alaska.edu.
reading message 1 (1750 bytes) . not flushed
reading message 2 (3984 bytes) ... not flushed
reading message 3 (2816 bytes) .. not flushed
    .
    .
    .
reading message 69 (2365 bytes) .. not flushed
reading message 70 (855 bytes)  not flushed

The problem is that these messages don't show up on my home machine.  For
example:

$ mail   
No mail for bkerin

where this mail command has been executed immediately after the fetchmail
comand above it.  I believe my shell is set to alert me to incoming mail
as well, and nothing shows up.  Again, I suspect the problem is related to
the fact that my user names on the systems are different.

As far as I know my mail setup is as generic as it gets in all other
respects.  If anyone out there has a working setup for circumstances like
mine I would love to see the .fetchmailrc file that worked for you.

Some related questions:

Is there an elegant userland way to bring up a ppp link and retrieve mail
every day at a specified time (like 4 AM)?  Options that occur to me are:

1.  A 'nohup'ed fetchmail in daemon mode with a retrieval interval of
tsecs = 60*60*24.  Presumably fetchmail looks at the clock and doesn't do
a timing loop, so there wouldn't be any drift.  This is inelegant because
I can't think of a way to bring ppp up (short of diald, which it doesn't
seem should be necisarry for a predictable demand of this sort), and it
would be difficult to make the process persistant in the face of reboots,
crashes, etc. 

2.  A recursive 'at' command or script or some such thing.  A nauseating
thought.

3.  Registry with a program like cron intended to service users.  Does
such a thing exist?

Lastly, does anyone have a clean way set up to invoke fetchmail as root
and get mail for all users?  I would like to see that also.

Thanks for any assistance you may be able to provide.

  
Britton Kerin
__
GNU GPL: "The Source will be with you... always."
(This sig, when found, was assumed to be GPL'ed)



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