Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 4.5.0 Reference Manual page 221

A user's
.fetchmailrc
• global options — Gives Fetchmail instructions that control the operation of the program or
provide settings for every connection that checks for email.
• server options — Specifies necessary information about the server being polled, such as the
hostname, as well as preferences for specific email servers, such as the port to check or
number of seconds to wait before timing out. These options affect every user using that
server.
• user options — Contains information, such as username and password, necessary to
authenticate and check for email using a specified email server.
Global options appear at the top of the
options, each of which designate a different email server that Fetchmail should check. User
options follow server options for each user account checking that email server. Like server
options, multiple user options may be specified for use with a particular server as well as to
check multiple email accounts on the same server.
Server options are called into service in the
verb, or , that precedes any of the server information. The
poll skip
to use this server option when it is run, which checks for email using the specified user options.
Any server options after a
is specified when Fetchmail is invoked. The
because it only checks skipped servers when specifically invoked, and does not
.fetchmailrc
affect any currently working configurations.
A sample
.fetchmailrc
set postmaster "user1" set bouncemail poll pop.domain.com proto pop3 user
'user1' there with password 'secret' is user1 here poll mail.domain2.com
user 'user5' there with password 'secret2' is user1 here user 'user7' there
with password 'secret3' is user1 here
In this example, the global options specify that the user is sent email as a last resort
( option) and all email errors are sent to the postmaster instead of the sender
postmaster
( option). The
bouncemail
two email servers are specified, one set to check using POP3, the other for trying various
protocols to find one that works. Two users are checked using the second server option, but all
email found for any user is sent to
checked on multiple servers, while appearing in a single MUA inbox. Each user's specific
information begins with the
file contains three classes of configuration options:
.fetchmailrc
.fetchmailrc
action, however, are not checked unless this server's hostname
skip
skip
file looks similar to the following example:
action tells Fetchmail that this line contains a global option. Then,
set
's mail spool. This allows multiple mailboxes to be
user1
action.
user
file, followed by one or more server
file by the use of a special option
poll
option is useful when testing configurations in
Fetchmail
action tells Fetchmail
197