Andy Balaam’s Blog

Fetchmail setup

My ISP provides my email by POP3, so I use fetchmail to download it every 10 minutes. I created a file .fetchmailrc file in my home directory that looks like this:

# Configuration created Wed Jul 27 06:43:07 2005 by fetchmailconf
set postmaster “andy”
set bouncemail
set no spambounce
set properties “”
poll mail.myisp.co.uk with proto POP3
user ‘andy@myisp.co.uk’ there with password ‘password’ is ‘andy’ here

This tells fetchmail to use the username and password given to me by my ISP to download mail into the default location for the user andy on the local machine. This would normally put my mail into /var/spool/mail/andy, or something like that, but to get it into my Maildir (which I talked about in a previous blog entry), I added these lines to a .procmailrc in my home directory:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/log

Now when I type the command fetchmail (logged in as andy) I get something like this:

$ fetchmail
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost != mail.myisp.co.uk
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost != mail.myisp.co.uk
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost != mail.myisp.co.uk
fetchmail: No mail for andy@myisp.co.uk at mail.myisp.co.uk

(No idea how to get rid of those errors, but they don’t seem to cause any problems.) And if any mail was found, it appears in my Inbox in Thunderbird, as if by magic.

Next time: how I send mail, using sendmail.

So I’ve put out FreeGuide version 0.10pre2, and then a little bug-fix release because the Linux RPMs were broken. By calling this 0.10pre2-2 I managed to annoy my faithful Gentoo packager Christian, and myself, but at the time it seemed too much hassle to bump everytjing up to 0.10pre3.

The next release, 0.10.3, is going to be stable, and everyone is finally going to be using and testing our latest code stream. We’ve had a few bugs reported again 0.10pre2, and we’ve already got a couple to fix, and then we’re going to push it out asap and get everyone migrated up.

I hope people will like the new version - it’s a lot faster, and the UI experience is better (in my opinion). I just hope there aren’t too many wrinkles in the upgrade path.

Alex has written some good upgrade code, but some of the concepts have changed, and I’m not entirely happy with the depths you have to delve into the Options screen just to play with your XMLTV grabber, but most things should “Just Work” for normal users.

After 0.10.3, I really want to get recording working, using Reuel’s plugin. If anyone wants to send me a UK digital TV card, you can be sure it would be put to good use…