Running Linux, 5th Edition

Getting the Mail to Your Computer with fetchmail

If your provider stores your mail for you until you fetch it, and you do not want to use your mailer to download the mail, you need a program that retrieves the mail from your provider's computer. There are a lot of programs for doing this; we will discuss fetchmail here briefly because it is both robust and flexible and can handle both POP3 and IMAP.

You can get fetchmail from your friendly Linux archive; chances are that your distribution carries it, too. If you download a source distribution of fetchmail, unpack, build, and install it according to the installation instructions. At the time of this writing, the current version was 6.2.5. The official home page for fetchmail is http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/.

You can control fetchmail's behavior via both command-line options and a configuration file. It is a good idea to first try to fetch your mail by passing the necessary information on the command line, and when this works, to write the configuration file.

As an example, let's assume that my provider is running the POP3 protocol, that my username there is joeuser, and that my password is secret. The hostname of the machine where the POP3 server is running is mail.isp.com. I can then retrieve my mail with the following command:

    fetchmail --protocol POP3 --username joeuser mail.isp.com

fetchmail then asks me for my password and, after I specify it correctly, retrieves the mail waiting for me and passes it on to my MTA for further ...