Fetchmail - setup question

Greetings
I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run. I
cannot find any reference to this in the manual pages and my internal
mailbox is rapidly filling up! Does anyone know of a way to turn this off? I
would be quite satisfied with it only putting an entry in the syslog (which
it is doing) and not sending the emails. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Greg Gailer
g_gailer@yahoo.com.au

In comp.os.linux.networking, Greg Gailer wrote:
>Greetings
>I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
>deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
>have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
>However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run.

It's not fetchmail that is sending those emails, but cron. Any output
from a cron job is 'captured' by cron and sent to the owner of the cron
job.
If you redirect the standard output from fetchmail to /dev/null (by
adding "> /dev/null" to the end of the fetchmail command) no output from
fetchmail is seen by cron and no email will be sent.

--
Maurice mauricej (at) xs4all (dot) nl

Maurice Janssen wrote:

> adding "> /dev/null" to the end of the fetchmail command) no output from
> fetchmail is seen by cron and no email will be sent.


You can also send stderr & stdout to /dev/null by appending 2>&1 . In
addition you can set the shell, email address and default directory for
cron.


SHELL=/bin/bash
MAILTO=spam_me_not@site.com
HOME=/home/gmt/

10 * * * * fetchmail ... >/dev/null 2>&1


gtoomey

On Tue, 13 Apr 2004 16:51:11 +1000, Greg Gailer wrote:
>
> I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
> deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
> have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
> However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run. I
> cannot find any reference to this in the manual pages and my internal
> mailbox is rapidly filling up! Does anyone know of a way to turn this off? I
> would be quite satisfied with it only putting an entry in the syslog (which
> it is doing) and not sending the emails. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Why not start it in daemon mode via

fetchmail <otheropts> -d 3600

Cheers,
Ingo

--
Ingo Strauch ---- Registered Linux User #227900 (http://counter.li.org/)
http://www.the-one-brack.org/

Ingo Strauch <strauch@mail.desy.de> wrote
news:slrnc7nfse.rcp.strauch@togo.desy.de:
>> wonderfully well. However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal
>> user each time it is run. I cannot find any reference to this in the

I think the mail is comming from the cron daemon.

Trah the output of your cron command :

0 * * * * * root fetchmail .... 2&>1 /dev/null

or set the MAILTO cron parameter to nothing :

MAILTO=
0 * * * * * root fetchmail .... 2&>1 /dev/null

But fetchmail is supposed to run in background without the help of cron :

fetchmail -d <sleep time>

or 'set daemon 300' dans le fichier fetchmailrc.


Regards

"Greg Gailer" <g_gailer@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
news:407b8bf2$0$27649$61ce578d@news.syd.swiftdsl.c om.au...
> Greetings
> I have set up fetchmail to retrieve my emails from an external server and
> deliver them to my small home network. I have a broadband connection and
> have set fetchmail up in an hourly cron job. It works wonderfully well.
> However, fetchmail sends an email to my internal user each time it is run.
I
> cannot find any reference to this in the manual pages and my internal
> mailbox is rapidly filling up! Does anyone know of a way to turn this off?
I
> would be quite satisfied with it only putting an entry in the syslog
(which
> it is doing) and not sending the emails. Any help is greatly appreciated.
>
> Greg Gailer
> g_gailer@yahoo.com.au

You don't have to run fetchmail form cron. In the fetchmailrc file you can
make it run in daemon mode and tell it how often to poll the mail servers.
Eg:

set daemon 300

makes it run in daemon mode and poll every 5 minutes. No cron required.

Regards,
Phill

Phill Edwards wrote:
[...]
> You don't have to run fetchmail form cron. In the fetchmailrc file you can
> make it run in daemon mode and tell it how often to poll the mail servers.
> Eg:
>
> set daemon 300
>
> makes it run in daemon mode and poll every 5 minutes. No cron required.


If you run fetchmail as a service, eg: "service fetchmail start", then
you must also edit the /etc/rc.d/init.d/fetchmail script to delete the
"-d nn" on the command line there.

See "man fetchmail" about "-d".

Good luck,
Martin

--
---------- Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today.
- Martin - Teach him how to fish and he won't bother you for weeks!
- 53N 1W - - Anon
----------