| FetchMail |
poll server protocol pop3 user "myuser" password "mypass" sslproto "" antispam 451
poll localhost
port 1143
protocol imap
user "myuserid"
password "mypassword"
is localuserid
mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %s"
keep
# run fetchmail in background, fetch every 120 seconds
fetchmail -d 120
-B <number> | --fetchlimit <number>
(Keyword: fetchlimit) Limit the number of messages accepted from
a given server in a single poll. By default there is no limit.
An explicit --fetchlimit of 0 overrides any limits set in your
run control file. This option does not work with ETRN or ODMR.
I run fetchmail on my imap server from a cron job. It fetches mail for all my accounts.
# crontab */5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/fetchmail -vvv > ~/logs/fetchmail.log 2>&1
I use procmail as my mda:
# .fetchmailrc poll hostname protocol pop3 user "me" password "mine" sslproto "" mda "/usr/local/bin/procmail -d me"
I don't like sending my email from fetchmail through sendmail because 1. sendmail is an incredibly huge beast, and 2. sendmail returns instantly allowing many mail processing processes to be spawned by fetchmail which can be very cpu intensive.
I use procmail to pass my email through SpamAssassin in order to rewrite the headers.
# .procmailrc :0fw:spamassassin.lock * < 256000 | /usr/local/bin/spamc
Then, procmail delivers my email to a perl
script which uses Mail::Audit by adding this to my .procmailrc.
# .procmailrc EXITCODE= TRAP=$HOME/bin/filter.pl
This allows me to write all my filters in perl. I only do some basic
filtering in Mail::Audit, but the filters catch a significant amount
of my incoming mail (spam and mailing lists) and file them so I don't
have to download them to Mail.app until I'm ready. This significantly
reduces the amount of time and bandwidth it takes to download my
email, and significantly reduces the cpu utilization of my PowerBook
(since it doesn't have to process all that spam). I use mutt on the
server to read through my spam and make sure there's no ham before
deleting it.
I tried replacing my fetchmail setup using the popread script that
comes with Mail::Audit. Unfortunately Mail::Audit has a memory leak.
Geekfarm gets a decent amount of spam... Every now and then
(e.g. after a power outage), thousands of emails would build up on the
server. The memory leak in Mail::Audit eventually caused the process
to run out of memory, after which unpredictable things happened.
Also, I found that Mail::POP3Client 's memory utilization would grow to
dozens of megs while fetching an attachment of a meg or two. This
aggravated the memory leak problem, to say the least... I updated the
script to exit when encountering the out-of-memory error, but then it
had to restart frequently enough that it would take forever catch up
(fetchmail+procmail is quite a bit faster). Eventually I had to give
up on the all-perl solution.