starting fetch mail when system boots up

Don Russell fedora at drussell.dnsalias.com
Thu May 25 03:14:50 UTC 2006


I have FC5 and recently started using fetchmail to poll my collection of 
pop3 accounts on various sites (work, gmail, isp, etc)

It works fine but recently I restarted the machine due to a new kernel 
and forgot to start fetchmail manually. No mail was lost of course, but 
I was wondering why I wasn't getting much mail for a day... (I say "much 
mail" because I was getting the mail that is sent to my smtp server 
directly)

Is there a (standard/best practices) way to start fetchmail 
automatically when the system starts? I've googled and seen that it's 
easy, just "service fetchmail start", but when I try that as root, I get 
an error that says fetchmail is an unrecognized service.

I want it to start automatically, just as apache, sendmail (smtpd) etc 
do... I don't want it to wait until I log on to my userid because I 
often access my mail from another system via IMAP (if I'm on the local 
network) or SquirellMail if I'm "outside".

[root at boris ~]# service fetchmail start
fetchmail: unrecognized service
[root at boris ~]# rpm -q fetchmail
fetchmail-6.3.4-0.fc5.1

I run fetchmail in daemon mode, starting it from the CLI (when I 
remember) :-)

Thanks,
Don




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