Multiple Fetchmail

[Longman]

* Dom Latter wrote:
> On Monday 20 October 2008 16:08:09 Longman wrote:
>> If I want to have fetchmail running in daemon mode for multiple users
>> but don't want those users to have shell access to the box what options
>> do I have available to me?
> 
> What are you *actually* trying to do here?  It may be that there is a more
> appropriate tool / solution than using fetchmail.
> 

I have a remote pop3 server.  It doesn't have much disk space (1.6GB).
Some people would like to have imap so they can access their box from
more than one location, and some accounts need accessing from more than
one location at the same time. I've setup an imap box on our lan and use
fetchmail to deliver to procmail then I have a procmail recipe to
deliver the mail as Maildir.  It's also faster for people (or is that a
false assumption?) as well as having plentiful HD capacity.  My only
gripe is that running fetchmail in deamon mode for each user that wants
imap access is a little bit hacky since fetchmail never appears to be
100% reliable and sometimes you can find it just doing 'funny stuff' in
the background (which then means you need to write a script to check
it's running etc). So I've opted to just use a bash script which uses
fetchmail (and creates a lock file) and run that from cron, giving a bit
more reliability. Obviously I'm logging at various levels to be sure I
don't lose mail :-)

An alternative would've been to have exim deliver directly to Maildir
remotely but since I only want Maildir for some accounts and mbox for
others is this possible using exim?

Also I could put a new harddisk in the remote box (and it does use LVM
so shouldn't be too tricky other than a car journey) but on the LAN we
have gigabit whereas we only have a 2M circuit for net access.

Suggestions welcome :-)