Setting up my ideal email system 3

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.