Linux Format forums

[jlturriff]

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

[nelz]

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.
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[wyliecoyoteuk]

sorry, not applicable
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[johnhudson]

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.

[nelz]