Re: polling imap and injecting in local mail spool

[alan@xxxxxxxxxxx]

On Mon, Dec 02, 2002 at 03:21:43PM -0500, Jeff Tucker wrote:
> --On Monday, December 02, 2002 5:00 PM +0100 Eric Persson <eric@persson.tm> 
> wrote:
> 
> >I've been trying to find a good piece of software to fetch all messages
> >from an IMAP account and inject them into the local mail spool, either
> >over smtp to 127.0.0.1 or with qmail-inject.
> >
> 
> Fetchmail <http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/> is probably the canonical 
> program for doing stuff like this. It's a big, bloated program but very 
> capable of pulling down messages with IMAP and reinjecting them via SMTP. 
	I have been using fetchmail for a couple of years now -- only on my
	small home Linux box, to be sure -- and IMHO it does the fundamental
	job it was designed to do, very well.

> This is really kind of a gross solution, though, which I would only do if 
> it were absolutely necessary. Is the mail provider incapable of forwarding 
> your email?
	Is it not better to link together tools, each of which does one
	thing well?   That is the qmail, and of course also the Unix,
	philosophy, no?  I don't understand "gross" in this context.

> I have personally seen mail loops, fetchmail processes which 
> never die, bounces caused because the SMTP you're sending to doesn't accept 
> the message, and others.
	And these are problems caused by fetchmail?  Have you reported
	them to ESR?

> Still, thousands of people worldwide depend on 
> fetchmail for their mail and it works just fine, except when it doesn't.
	Indeed.

Best wishes,

Alan McConnell, who admires fetchmail as a program, but doesn't admire a
lot of what ESR does

-- 
Alan McConnell :  http://patriot.net/users/alan
        War doesn't determine who's right, just who's left.
        Education cuts don't heal.