SEO

#1 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 06:45 PM

Greetings
I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run. I
cannot find any reference to this in the manual pages and my internal
mailbox is rapidly filling up! Does anyone know of a way to turn this off? I
would be quite satisfied with it only putting an entry in the syslog (which
it is doing) and not sending the emails. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Greg Gailer
g_gailer@yahoo.com.au

#2 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 06:45 PM

In comp.os.linux.networking, Greg Gailer wrote:
>Greetings
>I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
>deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
>have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
>However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run.

It's not fetchmail that is sending those emails, but cron. Any output
from a cron job is 'captured' by cron and sent to the owner of the cron
job.
If you redirect the standard output from fetchmail to /dev/null (by
adding "> /dev/null" to the end of the fetchmail command) no output from
fetchmail is seen by cron and no email will be sent.

--
Maurice mauricej (at) xs4all (dot) nl

#3 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 06:45 PM

Maurice Janssen wrote:

> adding "> /dev/null" to the end of the fetchmail command) no output from
> fetchmail is seen by cron and no email will be sent.

You can also send stderr & stdout to /dev/null by appending 2>&1 . In
addition you can set the shell, email address and default directory for
cron.

SHELL=/bin/bash
MAILTO=spam_me_not@site.com
HOME=/home/gmt/

10 * * * * fetchmail ... >/dev/null 2>&1

gtoomey

#4 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 06:45 PM

A Thousand Penguins Assembled the Message of
g_gailer@yahoo.com.au and helped write:

> Greetings
> I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
> deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
> have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
> However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run. I
> cannot find any reference to this in the manual pages and my internal
> mailbox is rapidly filling up! Does anyone know of a way to turn this off? I
> would be quite satisfied with it only putting an entry in the syslog (which
> it is doing) and not sending the emails. Any help is greatly appreciated.
>
> Greg Gailer
> g_gailer@yahoo.com.au
>
>

Cron sends you the email. If you use procmail to process mail
you can kill file the message with

:0:
* ^From:.*cron\ daemon.*
/dev/null

otherwise setup cron not to send the email or have your MUA
delete the message upon receipt.

You can also use
fetchmail -d 3600
to poll your mail provider every 60 minutes.

--
Best Regards, Keith
NW Oregon Radio http://kilowatt-radio.org/
Pax melior est quam iustissimum bellum.
Replace spam.e12b5bf2 with wvi dot com & del _

#5 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 06:59 PM

"Greg Gailer" <g_gailer@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:407b8bf2$0$27649$61ce578d@news.syd.swiftdsl.c om.au...
> Greetings
> I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
> deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
> have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
> However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run.
I
> cannot find any reference to this in the manual pages and my internal
> mailbox is rapidly filling up! Does anyone know of a way to turn this off?
I
> would be quite satisfied with it only putting an entry in the syslog
(which
> it is doing) and not sending the emails. Any help is greatly appreciated.
>
> Greg Gailer
> g_gailer@yahoo.com.au

You don't have to run fetchmail form cron. In the fetchmailrc file you can
make it run in daemon mode and tell it how often to poll the mail servers.
Eg:

set daemon 300

makes it run in daemon mode and poll every 5 minutes. No cron required.

Regards,
Phill

#6 (**permalink**) 01-17-2008, 07:00 PM

Phill Edwards wrote:
[...]
> You don't have to run fetchmail form cron. In the fetchmailrc file you can
> make it run in daemon mode and tell it how often to poll the mail servers.
> Eg:
>
> set daemon 300
>
> makes it run in daemon mode and poll every 5 minutes. No cron required.

If you run fetchmail as a service, eg: "service fetchmail start", then
you must also edit the /etc/rc.d/init.d/fetchmail script to delete the
"-d nn" on the command line there.

See "man fetchmail" about "-d".

Good luck,
Martin

--
---------- Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today.
- Martin - Teach him how to fish and he won't bother you for weeks!
- 53N 1W - - Anon
----------

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Fetchmail - setup question