Fetchmail

[Paco Ros Cifre]

El Lunes 04 Octubre 2004 01:17, Stephen Durham escribió:
> I posted this message to my local LUG as well. I figured the more people
> maybe the more help.
>
> Hello,
>         Is this a valid use or at least possible use of fetchmail and a
> series of other programs.
>
> 1. Collect mail from psu accounts, personal pop3 servers, and a program
> that collects yahoo email making it a pop3 setup.

Yes

> 2. Distribute it to individual user accounts on server.

No, this is MTA job (i.e. exim or postfix)

> 4. Allow another linux machine to collect their users (really only one
> user) mail from the local mailbox.

Only if you have a protocol to retrieve it such as pop3 or IMAP. You can also 
do this by exporting yout mailbox/maildir with NFS/Samba and not using 
Fetchmail (this is very unusual)

> 3. View mail via Evolution or Thunderbird at home and work; and maybe
> remotely with squirrel mail.

No. Fechmail get mail from another machine using pop3 or IMAP protocol and, 
then, fetchmail deliver all retrieved e-mail to a local MTA (postfix in 
Ubuntu). Postfix recieves a e-mail addressed to a local user (your user) and 
tries to deliver it to a local mailbox or local maildir. It can also filter 
spam if you have spamassassin installed before delivering the e-mail to the 
local user.

When your mail is in a local mailbox or local maildir, then, maybe another 
daemon such as courier-imap or courier-pop can allow access to this local box 
and serve e-mail for each user to a remote authenticated host.

You can also install apache and Squirrelmail. Squirrelmail is a IMAP client 
with a web based (PHP4) client. This client runs in a host that is allowed to 
read mail from the mail server running courier-imap (i.e. the same server) 
and generates HTML pages dinamically.

Fetchmail only retrieves mail, all other things are done by other programs.


> The reason I am looking at doing this is that I don't like my mail
> accounts at home and work to be different. Which requires me to make
> additional filters, to leave messages on server, and doesn't really
> allow me any remote access to mails I want to save.

This is all you could need (there more than these, it's only a example):
- fechmail (retrieve)
- postfix (transport)
- procmail (process)
- spamassassin (check for spam)
- courier-imap (imap access to stored e-mail)
- courier-pop (pop3 access to stored e-mail)
- apache + squirrelmail (webmail)

You can find tons of info. about these programs on the web. I wrote a tutorial 
about how to configure them, but is in spanish 
(http://bulma.net/body.phtml?nIdNoticia=1869) maybe babblefish or Google 
could help you.

Regards.
-- 
Paco.