Fetchmail without Postfix (Shallow Thoughts)

Fetchmail without Postfix

I've been using fetchmail for a couple of years to get mail from the mail server to my local machine. But it had one disadvantage: it meant that I had to have postfix (or a similar large and complex MTA) configured and running on every machine I use, even the lightweight laptop.

I run procmail to filter my mail into folders -- Linuxchix mail into one folder, GIMP mailing lists into another, and so forth -- and it seemed like it ought to be possible for fetchmail to call procmail directly, without going through postfix.

I found several suggestions on the web -- for instance, fetchmail-procmail-sendmail -- but they didn't work for me. fetchmail downloaded each message, passed it to procmail, and procmail appended it to the relevant mailbox without the appropriate "From " header that mail programs need to tell when each new message starts.

Finally, on a tip from bma on #linuxchix and after a little experimentation, I added this line to ~/.fetchmailrc:

mda /usr/bin/procmail -f %F -m /home/username/.procmailrc

Works great! And it's a lot faster than going through postfix.

Tags: linux, email, fetchmail, procmail
[ 15:07 Dec 15, 2009    More tech/email | permalink to this entry | ]