in its place

[andrej hocevar <ah@siol.net>]

hello

not much time has passed since i've joined this list, so not that much
mail has arrived to my mailbox before. now, the problem is as
follows. i was used to run fetchmail -cv (only checking for new mail, not
really downloading it) upon opening my ppp connection to see if there's
anything new at my pop3. then i used to open pine and read the three or
four messages. so this was ok. but today i got 260 pieces of mail when i
first checked.
with pine and a slow connection this means a big problem. it takes a lot
of time to even quickly scan it. and reading such a number while online
means a lot of money for my provider.

so you'll probably suggest to run fetchmail for the thing it's supposed to
do -- retreiving mail. and reading it peacefully offline.
next, is procmail the choice? or maybe using getmail?
i've never used neither procmail nor getmail. nor have i used fetchmail in
a combination with procmail or similar.
what should i choose and how to make fetchmail/getmail work with procmail
in order to sort my mail?
is the option --mda really enough to do the job?

nb: when trying to run fetchmailconf, i get this:

Traceback (innermost last):
  File "/usr/bin/fetchmailconf", line 1798, in ?
      hostname = socket.gethostbyaddr(socket.gethostname())[0]
      socket.error: host not found

thanks,

andrej