Re: ip-up for each user?

[Brian Servis <servis@purdue.edu>]

*- On  5 Apr, John Hasler wrote about "Re: ip-up for each user?"
> Robbie Huffman writes:
>> So how does fetchmail know who to run as? I'm supposing as the user who
>> called pppd, right?
> 
> It will run as root, because that is what pppd runs as.
> 
>> Otherwise more hacking will be necessary.
> 
> The conventional thing to do is to have root's .forward push the incoming
> mail through procmail or mailagent.  I do it slightly differently.  I have
> a user named 'postman' that exists just to receive mail.  In ip-up.d I have
> 
> su -c "fetchmail -v"  postman
> 
> which runs fetchmail as postman.  postman's .forward pushes the mail
> through mailagent, using rules that are conveniently located in postman's
> home directory, which is named 'postoffice'.   This nicely centralizes all
> the incoming mail stuff without cluttering root's home, and reduces the
> number of daemons running as root.

I missed the first post by Robbie but wouldn't it just be easier to use
a fetchmailrc that explicitly defines the relation of isp usernames to
local user names?  I have fetchmail start when ppp comes up with the
following script which is provided in the /usr/doc/fetchmail package.

#!/bin/sh
#/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/fetchmail-up

test -r /etc/fetchmailrc && \
        fetchmail --syslog --invisible --fetchmailrc /etc/fetchmailrc


and my /etc/fetchmailrc is <modified>

set daemon 120
poll <popserver.isp1> with timeout 60:
        user <isp1-username> there has password <isp1-passwd> is <local-name> here
        fetchall

poll <popserer.isp2> with protocol pop3 timeout 60:
        user <ips2-username> there has password <isp2-passwd> is <local-name> here
        fetchall

postconnect "exim -q"


This is all run by root and fetchmail passes it directly to exim via
smtp and it is immediatly dropped in my mailbox by exim. No middle man
involved.

-- 
Brian 
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Mechanical Engineering                                bservis@usa.net
Purdue University                   http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/~servis
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