If someone sends me mail, it is received and stored by the provider, and not automatically transferred to the local hosts; therefore it is necessary to download it. Fetchmail is a very popular program that downloads mail from a remote mail server (using e.g. the Post Office Protocol, POP) and forwards it to the local system for delivery (usually using postfix's sendmail wrapper). It is powerful yet easy to use and configure: after installation, the file ~/.fetchmailrc must be created and the program is ready to run (~/.fetchmailrc contains a password so appropriate permissions on the file are required).
This is an example .fetchmailrc:
代码: 全选
poll mail.bignet.it
protocol POP3
username alan there with password pZY9o is carlo here
flush
mda "/usr/sbin/sendmail -oem %T"
The last line (“mda ...”) is used only if postfix is not active as daemon on the system. Please note that the POP-mail server indicated in this file (mail.bignet.it) is only used to retrieve mails, and that it is not necessary the same as the mail relay used by postfix to send out mails.
After setting up the .fetchmailrc file, the following command can be used to download and deliver mail to the local system:
The messages can now be read with mutt.
