fetchmailrc and gmail and pop

[Jay Daniels]

On Sat, 2009-07-18 at 07:32 -0600, Karl F. Larsen wrote:
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> 
> Admin wrote:
> > Hi there,
> > 
> > I am trying to pop from gmail with fetchmail and getting errors at all 
> > different types of configurations.  I've found a few howtos that have 
> > not helped.
> > 
> > Is there a configuration that is working out there that somebody can 
> > send me and/or a tutorial that explains how to get fetchmail with gmail 
> > working?
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > 
> > Noah
> > 
> 	This is not help for your problem, but be aware that Thunderbird is
> free and it will work with gmail either pop or imap. It allows you to
> have many directories with specific email address sorting.
> 
> 
> 73 Karl
> 
> 


Karl you are correct, Thunderbird is an excellent client.  However,
there are specific reasons Linux users prefer fetchmail and running
their own MTA or using msmtp to send mail.

First of all, have you ever noticed the latency when clicking the send
button in Thunderbird, or downloading your email and Thunderbird seems
to hang or interfere with what you are doing?  Perhaps it's just me on
this crappy satellite internet conneciton, but I much prefer fetchmail
handle getting my mail and msmtp for sending my mail.  No latency, and
sending email is instant, POOF it's sent - no wait a second, wait more,
ok finally sent...

Getting my mail is invisible to me with fetchmail and procmail (as it
should be).  It just appears in my mua automatically in the specific
folders processed by procmail.  I use Evolution instead of Thunderbird
because Evo will access my Mail folders directly without any pop3 or
imap server.

my mail setup:  fetchmail run by cron -> procmail to sort my email into
-> ~/.maildir/ folders in which Maildir folders require no lock file to
access since each message is it's own single file with unique generated
filenames.  msmtp called by the commandline or linked to a fake sendmail
in /usr/lib/sendmail or /usr/bin/sendmail allows Evolution to find msmtp
without setting anything in Evolution except to tell it to use Sendmail
to send mail.  Of course I have to setup .msmtprc, but only once.  Save
all these config files and mail and a list of programs I installed - a
reinstall is pretty quick too in case of hard drive failure.

It wasn't that long ago when you had to have some sort of local mta to
deliver the mail because Linux mua's did not have this feature built in.
Why should they when all Linux distros had it's own mta installed.

I just wish Ubuntu would use this type of mail setup as the default
setup, adding email to an sql database would be a plus too.  And I sure
miss system notifications!  No mta installed by default makes Linux act
more like Windows no builtin local mail for security alerts:( - bad
idea.  Yeah, you got system log, but a watchdog like program via email
like the old redhat (and all other distros before Ubuntu) provided much
more info.

Out of the box and since it is already installed and is the default mail
client in Ubuntu, I stick with Evolution.




jay d.
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