Re: Seeking clarification about mail program interaction

[Carel Fellinger <cfelling@iae.nl>]

On Tue, Nov 27, 2001 at 09:23:52PM -0400, cmasters wrote:
> Greetings,

> 1. fetchmail (currently getmail) retrieves mail from ISP and hold it locally

fetchmail gets the mail and then hands it over to exim unless you told
it to use procmail directly.  The standard exim config will make exim
hand it over to procmail iff ~/.procmailrc exists.

> 2. procmail ~should~ then sort it according to recipes that I write
> 3. mutt reads the mail from any and ~all~ folders / mbox's that have been
> effected by the sorting
> 
> My difficulty is that the few times I have tested fetchmail, it retrieves
> and then deletes ~all~ mail not expressly addressed to
> "cmasters@nbnet.nb.ca". This means that mail from lists (including this one)

That smells like some misconfiguration.  should be easily fixable.
For starters to keep all mail at your ISP (handy when trying things
out:) use:

   options no flush, keep, fetchall

It seems wise to specify the default user in multi-drop mode with:

   set postmaster your-local-user-name

A likely reason for dropped messages seems to be that somehow you are
running in multi drop mode.  If so, make sure that the last name is a
star (*), or better, don't run in multi drop mode unless you need to.
Anyhow, for testing it's sane to forgoo bouncing messages with:

   set no bouncmail

The above to set statements should instruct fetchmail to deliver all
messages to your-local-user-name no matter what.  If it doesn't get
there your exim or procmail is malfunctioning.  I would advice to
disable procmail at first by renaming ~/.procmailrc with:

  login as your-local-user-name
  $ mv ~/.procmail ~/.procmailrc.sav

Further more it would be handy to know that you can send yourself
locally a mail, try with:

  $ mutt -s test your-local-user-name </dev/null

Combining the above and obeying fetchmail pickiness on where certain
parameters are to be placed, your fetchmailrc file could look like:


   set postmaser your-local-user-name
   set no bouncemail

   poll pop.nbnet.nb.ca with proto pop3:
      user cmasters there with password secret is your-local-user-name here
      options no flush, keep, fetchall


-- 
groetjes, carel