fetchmail

Geoff Shang Geoff at quitelikely.com
Sun Nov 25 08:04:42 UTC 2007


Daniel Dalton wrote:

> Do I just need exim for fetchmail?

You will need some form of mail transport agent, yes.  Exim should do just 
fine.  It's what I use.

> When I run
> dpkg-reconfigure exim
> I get an error about unknown file type.

If you want help with error messages, you will need to be specific about 
what the message is otherwise no-one will be able to help you.  Also, 
googling error messages is often a useful thing to do.

> And if I type "fetchmail"
> I get:
> /home/daniel/fetchmailrc must have no more than -rwx---x---(0710) 
> permissions.

This error message means that fetchmail considers your personal Email 
settings to be in a file which is not secure enough.

> Any ideas on what I should do?

Read the chmod man page for more info about file permissions.  Basically it 
is saying that only you as the owner should be able to read the file.  I 
could just simply give you the command but it's probably more useful to you 
to learn how to do it yourself.  You probably want it to be readable and 
writeable by the owner (i.e. you) and nothing else.

> My .fetchmail is like the one I will paste below:
> poll pop.gmail.com
> proto pop3
> username daniel.dalton47 at gmail.com
> password mypassword

Didn't you say you need SSL for this?

Also, you might want to include a daemon line in your .fetchmailrc file to 
make fetchmail keep on checking your mail.  For example:

set daemon 180

would have it check mail every 3 minutes.

This daemon line shouldn't be in a poll definition.

Geoff.




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