On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 02:27:05PM +0530, Sandip P Deshmukh wrote: > 1. how do i run fetchmail? as a daemon or what? If you have a permanent net connection, then you can run it as a daemon. Edit /etc/fetchmailrc and start /etc/init.d/fetchmail. If not, then just setup your ~/.fetchmailrc and run fetchmail when you feel like it. > 2. can i ask fetchmail to download only headers and delete unwanted > headers off the server only? I don't think so...Why would you want to do this? Are you getting that much spam? > 3. after fetchmail fetches mail, where will it put it? By default, fetchmail hands off mail to your MTA. In your case, this is Exim. Exim, again by default, puts it in /var/mail/<username>. I don't know if Mozilla can read a mbox mail spool though... > 4. are there any easy to configure utilities that will segregate mail > finally downloaded? Procmail seems to be king for this sort of thing. Read the tutorial at procmail.org or the Quickstart guide (/usr/share/doc/procmail/Quickstart) to get you started. If you have a ~/.procmailrc file then Exim will you use procmail to deliver your mail automatically. > 4. which software do i use to read the mail fetched by fetchmail? can > i use mozilla? I don't know if Mozilla can read mbox's; I use mutt and it works great. > 5. any other stuff that might be useful/ interesting etc. You've got a much greater range of choices under Linux with mail, compared to Windows. The setup I use is fetchmail->exim->procmail->mutt, which seems to be fairly popular around here. There are a number of advantages to splitting up the task into little pieces like this: Firstly, each bit is replaceable. I've been hearing good things about mailagent; if I decided to switch to using it to filter my mail, then I just need to modify my ~/.forward file to tell Exim about it, and that's it. If I decide that postfix would be fun, then that's easy to swap out too. Secondly, each bit does it's job extremely well. Exim has been around for years, and people hammer on it hard. It's extremely well tested, and I can't think of the last time that someone found a functional bug in it. Compared to Mozilla, which still crashes on me every few days. Apples and oranges, maybe, but simple tools that do one thing well has shown itself to be a good way to code. Lastly, all these tools are extremely extensible. Say I want to start filtering my mail based on the number of characters in the message; if I were using Mozilla to fetch my mail from a POP server, then I'd have some serious hacking to do to the Moz code base. With procmail, I just need a single rule. -rob
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