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Fetchmail - The Ultimate Mail Collector

Introduction

Fetchmail is an IMAP, POP2, POP3, etc. collector.
It allows you to retrieve emails from different mailboxes and consolidate them in your personal mailbox.

Installation

For installation, the usual steps:

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apt-get install fetchmail

Configuration

For a single user

Let's create a .fetchmailrc file in our home directory:

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touch ~/.fetchmailrc

And insert these lines (for POP3):

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poll pop.myprovider.com with proto POP3
user 'address@email.com' there with password 'PASSWORD' is 'USER' here options fetchall

For multiple users

If you want to create a file that will fetch (yes, the verb 😉) emails for multiple users with a single file, create the file "/etc/fetchmailrc" and insert lines like this:

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poll pop.myprovider.com proto pop3 port 995 user 'username' password 'password' smtpname "unixuser" options fetchall ssl

Here the POP3 is with SSL, which is why we have the "ssl" option at the end.

Launch

Before doing anything, let's just test if the current configuration works:

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fetchmail -c

Now that everything is good, let's retrieve our emails:

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fetchmail

1 message for USER at pop.myprovider.com (1801 bytes).
reading message address@email.com:1 of 1 (1801 bytes) . deleted

FAQ

mail forwarding loop

If you encounter this type of message, and have a line like this:

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Jan  7 15:40:25 fire postfix/local[24131]: 0AE56422D0: to=<xxx@mycompany.com>, orig_to=<xxx@mycompany.com>, relay=local, delay=0.1,delays=0.07/0.01/0/0.02, dsn=5.4.6, status=bounced (mail forwarding loop for xxx@mycompany.com)

You need to add the "dropdelivered" option configured like this:

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poll x.x.x.x proto pop3 port 995 user 'pmavro' password 'xxx' dropdelivered smtpname "pierre.mavro" options fetchall ssl

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