Fetchmail and Procmail – the basics
\nIn response to a fair few questions on these two programs (and a desire from Richard to have me do a talk on them) I’ve put together these introductory notes on the subject. <\/p>\n
\nhttp:\/\/ieee.uow.edu.au\/~mjp16\/misc\/fetchprocmail.html
\n<\/p>\n
Fetchmail and Procmail – the basics
\nIn response to a fair few questions on these two programs (and a desire from Richard to have me do a talk on them) I’ve put together these introductory notes on the subject. <\/p>\n
Fetchmail The options should be filled in appropriately, as follows: This tells fetchmail to startup and poll for mail every 600 seconds (10 minutes). Change this number for more rapid or occasional polling. Can add –syslog to the startup command line, or set syslog to the beginning of .fetchmailrc (before any poll lines) to make all log messages go to syslog. in your $HOME\/.forward file, replacing Should place in PATH only directories which you will need, to maximise security. If in doubt, have an empty path and specify full path on all binaries. Most useful flag – c – specifies that mail which matches this recipe should still be matched against the rest of the recipes, and not considered delivered. Fetchmail and Procmail – the basics In response to a fair few questions on these two programs (and a desire from Richard to have me do a talk on them) I’ve put together these introductory notes on the subject. http:\/\/ieee.uow.edu.au\/~mjp16\/misc\/fetchprocmail.html<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wildow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nTakes mail from a central store (typically your ISPs mail machine) to the local system.
\nConfig file $HOME\/.fetchmailrc. Permissions must be 0600, to protect password details.
\nUse the following line for each server you’re taking mail from in your .fetchmailrc file:
\npoll
\n\tuser “
\nserver – your ISP’s mail machine, such as pop.isp.com.
\nproto – The protocol you use to pick up your mail. Usually either pop3 or imap, though the program does support many others. If you need them, you’ll know it.
\nusername – your username on the server. The double quotes help protect against any untoward characters (such as spaces and periods) which might otherwise make things unpleasant.
\npass – the password of your account on the server mail machine. This is why we set such restrictive permissions on .fetchmailrc.
\nlocal username – Your username on the local machine (where fetchmail is running). This is useful if, for instance, your ISP assigns you a username fre9kjm, when you’re known as fred on your local box.
\nTo have fetchmail run periodically whilever the link to the Internet is active, place the following line in ip-up (or equivalent):
\nsu -c
\nTo stop fetchmail again when the link goes down, place this in ip-down (or equivalent):
\nsu -c
\nAdd –logfile
\nProcmail
\nFilters mail based on user-specified rules.
\nConfig file: $HOME\/.procmailrc
\nShould be the default local delivery agent on most Linux systems – ask the sysadmin if you’re not sure. If it isn’t, place the line
\n“|
\nTypical config:
\nPATH=
\nLOGFILE=
\n
\nmaildir – likely to be $HOME\/Mail or similar.
\ndefault mailbox – where mail which doesn’t fit any filtering recipe will be put.
\nlogfile – hmm, well…. (grin)
\nRecipes
\n:0 [flags]
\n
\n
\nIf there are multiple conditions, all must match for the action to be executed.
\nIf there are no conditions, then the recipe is always true.
\nA condition is signalled by a ‘*’ – everything after that (except leading and trailing whitespace) is considered to be the regular expression to match against.
\nRegular expressions are a cryptic and powerful language for describing strings. Common components used are:
\n^ – start of line.
\n$ – end of line.
\n. – any single character, except newline
\n(
\n* – 0 or more of the previous character or group.
\n+ – 1 or more of the previous character or group.
\n? – zero or one instances of the previous character or group.
\n\\ – escape the next character.
\nAny other character – itself.
\nManual pages for egrep(1) and sed(1) are also instructive for extended regular expressions.
\nEscapes are used to make an ordinarily special character match literally instead. For instance, if you wanted to match against the ‘$’ character, then if you just placed it by itself, procmail would interpret that as ‘match if end of line’. Instead, we use ‘\\$’ to match against a single ‘$’.
\nThere are some special procmail-specific tokens which you can use:
\n^TO – Should match any line which specifies a message recipient containing the word which follows.
\n^FROM_DAEMON – Should match on any message which was sent from an automated mail program (mailing list software, spam bot, whatever).
\nPlenty examples are available in the procmailex(5) man page.
\nReferences
\nThe Fetchmail home page
\nThe Fetchmail FAQ
\nThe procmail home page
\nMan pages:
\nfetchmail(1)
\nprocmail(1)
\nprocmailrc(5)
\nprocmailex(5) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"