On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 08:21:40AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
[...]
> > All that said, we won't hold the stone age against ya ;)
>
> Guilty re the stone age. What I have has been working well for decades.
I think that dismissive, sometimes condescending tone is not
warranted. Fetchmail is a fine piece of software, albeit perhaps
not maintained, and it might have some tricks up its sleeve
the others haven't picked up.
Arrogance is out of place here.
I used the fetchmail/procmail combo in a specific situation
for a while (not the stone age, a couple of years between
2011 and 2016) and didn't find anything which could have
taken up this job:
it was in a corporate environment. The server department was
deeply entrenched in Microsoft, so mail was served by an
Exchange [1] server, and luckily the admins left the IMAP
service up. My workstation was Linux, and mutt (my preferred
mail reader) luckily (again) could cope with the (typically
Microsoft-y) Rube Goldbergian authentification method which
is NTLM.
So I was reading mails fine. Until some day, Corporate
decided that mails were to be archived after a short period
(one week or so). Storage shortage (seriously?).
Since a big chunk of my operative memory is searching in
mail archives this didn't go well for me. And the archive
was behind one of those crude web interfaces... well, I
won't try to describe it to avoid putting unnecessary strain
on the list moderation :-/
So downloading my mailbox from IMAP with NTLM authentication
was it.
No single program besides fetchmail in the huge Debian distro
fit the bill besides fetchmail. And of course, if you say
fetchmail, the other side is procmail [2].
I know that there are other more pleasing alternatives from
a more "theoretical" POV. Imapsync. Sieve -- to just point
at alternatives to both above. When it went down to get
dirty, it was fetchmail/procmail.
So snicker at stone age all you want, but if you haven't
made your homework, you might look silly ;-)
Cheers
[1] Why do I always read that name as an invitation, like in
"exchange this server, ASAP"?
[2] Yeah. You can also inject into a local Postfix/Exim/whatnot.
Since I had already Exim for outgoing... but hey. And good
luck eliminating duplicates (which I had to!) with an MTA
setup. Procmail has a recipe for that.
-- tomás
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