Fetchmail Polling Interval?

[Michael Schwendt]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 09:47:17 -0400, Reuben D. Budiardja wrote:

> On Monday 26 July 2004 08:06, Rainer Bendig wrote:
> > Harding, Devon wrote on Mon Jul 26, 2004 at 07:59:21AM -0400:
> > > The 'Check Server' Command exists in WebMin.  What would be the syntax
> > > for cron job?
> >
> > e.g. "fetchmail -d 60"
> > for polling every 60 Seconds
> 
> Just for clarity, this is not the 'syntax for cronjob'. That command would run 
> fetchmail as a daemon, and fetchmail would automatically poll from server(s) 
> every 60 seconds.
> 
> You either do that, or use fetchmail in a cron job. If using fetchmail as 
> cronjob, you don't want to have the "-d" option, otherwise you'll end up with 
> a bunch of fetchmail daemons (hmm.. dunno if that's possible or not though).

It's not possible, fortunately. Fetchmail protects itself from that
and recognizes if it's running already.

But running a cron job which starts "fetchmail -d INTERVAL &> /dev/null"
periodically is a great thing for several reasons. First of all, after a
reboot, this would restart your fetchmail daemon after some
time. Secondly, the fetchmail daemon can deactivate itself and send you a
warning if it encounters permanent delivery problems. Compared with
running plain fetchmail from a cron job, you would not get that warning
and not any error output either (because of output redirection to
/dev/null as most people would do).