Linux Format forums

Re: Mail retrieval question

nelz — Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:21 am

Author: nelz

Posted: Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:21 am

johnhudson wrote:

You cannot download mail to Kmail when a user is not logged in; that is a fairly obvious security precaution.

If KMail is set to retrieve from a local maildir, you can use getmail or fetchmail to put the mail there, ready for KMail to read when it loads up. You could also run a local mailserver and download mail for all accounts into it, but that may be overkill.

Re: Mail retrieval question

johnhudson — Mon Jun 11, 2012 11:04 pm

Author: johnhudson

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 11:04 pm

You cannot download mail to Kmail when a user is not logged in; that is a fairly obvious security precaution.

I'm not sure why you would want to download mail to other users' accounts; are you sure the ISPs are worried about the length between downloads - most allow three to six months without use before disabloing accounts.

Re: Mail retrieval question

wyliecoyoteuk — Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:38 pm

Author: wyliecoyoteuk

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:38 pm

sorry, not applicable

Re: Mail retrieval question

nelz — Mon Jun 11, 2012 10:17 am

Author: nelz

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 10:17 am

sendmail is used for sending mail, so not relevant here. Fetchmail can do this for you and can be told to download mail from specific accounts for individual users, so it does exactly what you want. However, it is not the most user-friendly of programs to set up. Getmail may be a better alternative, it comes with better organised and more readable documentation, as well as example configs. Each user's .getmail directory contains a file for each account they want to download from and their crontab contains one of more lines to run these configs as often as you want.

Mail retrieval question

jlturriff — Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:25 am

Author: jlturriff

Posted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 5:25 am

Hi,

I've been looking through your forum archive and reading man pages, but I can't find anything that explains what I want to do:

I'm using ADSL to connect to my ISP. My machine (running Kmail in KDE3 in OpenSuSE 12.1) has several user accounts, each of which has a separate ISP mailbox. I want to set it up so that when the machine connects to the ISP the mail in each mailbox will be downloaded, even when the associated local user is not logged in. (Some of the user accounts are seldom used, so mail for them can stack up a lot on the ISP side; that's what I'm trying to avoid.)

It looks like a combination of fetchmail and sendmail ought to do the trick, but none of the scenarios I've found so far address this particular need.

Can you help, please?

Leslie