lab 09 fetchmail

[marcromansky]

So, watchout for fetchmail. It does what it says it is going to do, fetch your mail and download it to elrond taking it off of your email server. Then of course, if you read your email using /bin/mail, and don't save it, poof! it's gone. The /bin/mail & fetchmail team especially likes your most important Board of Equalization emails that you have been putting off reading.....

[Rich Simms]

Check your mbox file (use[b] mail -f[/b]).

/bin/mail won't delete a message unless you use the delete command. Any message that has been opened goes to mbox after using the q (quit) command to exit /bin/mail. Messages stay in your regular intray if you use x (exit) to exit /bin/mail.

- Rich

[John LeMieux]

Is there an easy way to get the mail back on the server? I had a lot of messages archived there.

[Rich Simms]

Ouch!

Forwarding it back sound like the best approach. I research it some more today and let you know what I find.

In the meantime there are mail accounts created for each CIS 192 student on Hershey (middleearth.net) and at hayrocket.com you can use. Use the same usernames and passwords we used in the last class.

- Rich

[Rich Simms]

Here is a manual way to forward the messages downloaded by fetchmail back to your ISP email address:

Login as a regular user
Configure Evolution for your ISP POP server and choose "keep messages on server"
In /bin/mail save your downloaded messages to mbox in your home directory
In Evolution, import the single file named mbox into your Evolution Intray
Forward important messages back to your ISP email address.

After looking through the fetchmail manual at [url]http://fetchmail.berlios.de/[/url] there is a [b]keep[/b] setting that you can put in your .fetchmailrc configuration file. It keeps the messages from being flushed from the server after they are downloaded. Unfortunately this does not help Marc or John whose messages have already been deleted from their POP server.

I added this setting to Lab 9 instructions to keep it from happening to any more students and apologize for the headaches this has caused Marc and John. I also added information on how to use your accounts on Hershey or hayrocket.com as an alternative to using your own ISP.

I'm hoping there is still a way to take the messages in mbox and relay rather than forward them back to the ISP mail server for an automated way to "unfetch" the fetched mail.

- Rich

[marcromansky]

yup the mail -f did the trick. I know I am being lazy here, but, how you do forward and email in mail?