Question

[karlp at ourldsfamily.com]

>> I want to thank everyone for your help, by using the suggestions
>> on this list I was able to track down where the problem probably
>> was and what was happening which helped me narrow down my web
>> search and I found the answer.
>>
>> Apparently comcast is using a windows server and it's POP3 is not
>> standard so about 80K though an email download using POP3 it
>> sends an expected end of file.  To get around this you need to
>> add the fetchall commnad and now I get my full file downloaded.
>>
>> One last question and I'll stop.  I've been running my fetchmail
>> command as a cron job because for some reason it doesn't want to
>> keep running using the daemon command.
>
> Don't you need to run fetchmail as the user you want it to fetch mail
> for?  Running it from the /etc/rc.d stuff will try to run it as the root
> user and you probably don't have a "~root/.fetchmailrc" file.

No, running it as root is fine. This gives you the capability of running
any and all fetches from one location and one daemon with one timer.
/root/.fetchmailrc needs to be configured and look something like:

# Configuration created Sat Jan 19 by KLP
set logfile "/var/log/fetchmail"
set postmaster "postmaster"
set bouncemail
set properties ""
set daemon 120
poll remote_mail_server.com and options no dns
       user 'your_remote_user_name' there with password 'remote_pw' is
'local_user' here options fetchall
    smtphost  your_mail_server_domain.com


>
>> Reading what others posted about fetchmail I though I would
>> change my setup and run in rc.local using the command "fetchmail
>> -v -v -l0 -d900" but it doesn't seem to want to start there.
>
> Don't use "-v"s when running as a daemon--daemons don't have a stdout.
>
>> Where do you put your fetchmail command to get it running on
>> boot?
>
> You could put it in /etc/rc.d/rc.local but you'd need to prefix it
> as
>
> 	su -c "fetchmail -d 900" normalusername

I just put the line:

/usr/bin/fetchmail

in /etc/rc.d/rc.local and it comes up on boot and with the
/root/.fetchmailrc file (permissiona: 710) as above (with other fetch
sites removed for brevity), it's very nice and hasn't fallen down for
several years.

Karl