On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Praedor Atrebates wrote: > My desire is that no matter how many users are using, only ONE fetchmail > process is needed.
That's what the daemon is for; one process, fetching everyone's mail. > Instead of all users running their own fetchmail, have the system run > ONE and have this one process check for ~/.fetchmailrc files in all user > directories and go from there. As a new user creates a .fetchmailrc, > the fetchmail daemon would simply find it and use it on the next fetch. Fetchmail is not capable of this. OTOH, as the syntax of the config file is so absurdly simple and englishlike, it is trivial for the root user to add servers and username/password pairs to /etc/fetchmailrc to accomplish essentially the same thing. At that one process runs as root, root is the only user that can do this. Users can run their own instances of the app if they want, of course, even if the daemon also runs as a service. > - From your answer I assume that fetchmail is not capable of this. To > my thinking, this is a flaw in design. Instead of designing a system > that requires each and every user run independent instances of > fetchmail, it is self evident that a single process handling the mail > for any and all users is more logical and clean in design. Complain to Eric Raymond, then. He has provided an app that can be run as a daemon for system-wide mail retrieval *and/or* as a user job for a more individualized approach, but you just can't please everyone, it seems. :) Were you so inclined, you could cobble together a script that looked into each homedir for a .fetchmailrc file, and either invoked a single copy of fetchmail using each found file (i.e. doing a single poll), then loop, or alternatively, copied the "poll" and "user" lines from said files into the /etc/fetchmailrc file being used by the daemon (as the daemon can tell when that file has changed since the last poll, and will auto-reload it). As always, TIMTOWTDI; there's no need to build it into the app itself. -- Bill Mullen [EMAIL PROTECTED] MA, USA RLU #270075 MDK 8.1 & 9.0 "Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to every- body is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.'" -- Dave Barry
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