Revision as of 20:39, 28 January 2008

Important Note

Please note that these manual installation instructions should only be used on Ubuntu distributions, such as Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10 server, the distribution the document was written for. If you install Scalix on un unsupported platform, this invalidates your ability to receive Scalix support. The same counts for the usage of third party tools like fetchmail. Thank you for your understanding and compliance.

This document might be inaccurate and under construction. Do not trust this document.

Installing and configuring fetchmail on Ubuntu 7.10 Server (Gutsy Gibbon)

As Ubuntu 7.10 is an unsupported platform there is currently no manual describing the installation of fetchmail (a tool that can be used to retrieve and forward email) to be used in combination with Scalix. As I managed to get Scalix it up and running and I already documented and shared this with the community (here), I thought it would be useful to share my experiences regarding the fetchmail configuration as well.

So below you'll find a how-to that describes the installation and configuration fetchmail to be used with Scalix on a Ubuntu 7.10 server.

Fetchmail is a mail-retrieval and forwarding utility that can fetch mail from remote mailservers (e.g. pop3 and imap) and forwards it to your local machine’s delivery system (Scalix in this case). The fetchmail utility can be run in a daemon mode to repeatedly poll one or more systems at a specified interval, and that's what this how-to will describe.

I used several sources of information on the web. I listed the ones I can remember at the end of the document under Sources.

Install the fetchmail software

Fetchmail is Open Source Software available on the internet here. Under Ubuntu we have a package available that can be installed directly with apt-get. So install the fetchmail package:

sudo apt-get install fetchmail

Configure fetchmail

To make fetchmail run in daemon mode and have it poll for mail from several pop3 or imap servers frequently, we have to edit two configuration file: /etc/fetchmailrc and /etc/default/fetchmail.

In the file /etc/default/fetchmail you have to change the START_DAEMON directive from no into yes. After that the file should look like this:

# This file will be used to declare some vars for fetchmail
#
# Uncomment the following if you don't want localized log messages
# export LC_ALL=C

# If you want to specify any additional OPTION to the start
# scripts specify them here
# OPTIONS=...

# Declare here if we want to start fetchmail. 'yes' or 'no'
START_DAEMON=yes

The file /etc/fetchmailrc should be created as it does not exist yet. So use your favorite text editor and create a file that looks like this:

set syslog;
set daemon 90;

poll "pop3.provider1.com"
with protocol pop3
user "pop3user" password "pop3password"
smtphost "" smtpname ""