getting off this mailing list

[Bob Nielsen]

On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 05:41:59PM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 02:26:06PM -0700, Bob Nielsen wrote:
> > The easiest way to use fetchmail is as a daemon, where no user interface 
> > is needed at all.  
> 
> Mmm, that's playing with words a little bit. Yes, there's
> 'no user interface' in the day-to-day use of fetchmail, but
> 
> 1) you need to set it up, which requires either
>    a) learning the ~/.procmailrc syntax or
>    b) using the atrocious fetchmailconf program.

I assume you mean ~/.fetchmailrc (or /etc/fetchmailrc).

> 
> 2) you need to get it to start when your system boots,
>    meaning either
>    a) putting it in a startup script somewhere, or
>    b) going through GNOME's Sessions control panel.

A startup script (/etc/init.d/fetchmail) should already exist.  This 
only is useful if a system-wide /etc/fetchmailrc is used (although a 
simple cron job is a possibility).

> 
> 3) if something goes wrong (stale lockfiles happen, and
>    other oddities), you need to use the command line to fix
>    it.

This is true of many other applications and I don't know of any GUIs 
which will handle the myriads of possibile failure modes.

> 
> No one should have to do any of this. It should all be
> configurable through a nice GUI. Preferably all the mail
> clients that you might ever use -- Evolution, kmail,
> Thunderbird, mutt, whatever -- would all call out to a nice
> configurator for fetchmail. The ~/.fetchmailrc grammar is
> not that complicated, so it shouldn't be hard to write a
> nice GUI for it.

I agree that fetchmailconf is pretty bad (as is the fetchmailrc man 
page) but the example provided with the package is well-annotated.

> 
> Procmail, on the other hand, is atrocious -- even the
> command-line stuff is unbearably complicated. It took me a
> while to figure out what the hell was going on, and I'm not
> even doing any complicated inbound-message processing.

I've never used it from the command line, but I'll admit that 
configuring ~/.procmailrc the first time (10 years ago) was a bit 
of a learning experience.  After getting through that however, I have 
only had to touch it when adding new mailing list folders.

Bob