fetchmail and gmail Success only when there is no mail. 7279

(Bear with me, David. There are newbies reading the thread too...)

By default, fetchmail delivers to a local port 25 listener, usually a full-featured MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) like sendmail or exim...

If that doesn't exist on your box, then you need to tell fetchmail explicitly to deliver the mail to an MDA (Mail Delivery Agent).

The most common MDA in the Linux-Unix world is procmail, and you'd need a line like this in your fetchmailrc, after the

and wants mda "-usr-bin-formail -dsusr-bin-procmail"

If you don't want to mess with procmail (an excellent tool), then you can use a line like this:

Formail comes with the procmail package. What it does here is mail and makes sure that there is a space after each addition to the mail spool. Note that if you are using maildir format locally, instead of mbox, you'll need to use procmail.

You could write a simple bash-sed script to do the work of formail here.

Your MUA (Mail User Agent) needs that From line.

There are other MDAs around, though I have no experience with them. "Deliver" is one that I've heard of.

comp.mail.misc

Peace,

Alan

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