Timothy Murphy wrote:

Unfortunately, neither fetchmail not KMail on my laptop seem able to retrieve mail from my desktop.

With fetchmail I get the error message:

[tim@william ~]$ fetchmail alfred fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost.localdomain != alfred fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost.localdomain != alfred 10 messages for tim at alfred. reading message tim@alfred.murphy.ie:1 of 10 (765 header octets) fetchmail: fetchmail: getaddrinfo(localhost.smtp) fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed fetchmail: SMTP transaction error while fetching from alfred fetchmail: Query status=10 (SMTP)

OK. First there's the name problems, which fetchmail seems to be warning (not erroring) about. But it does seem to fetch the e-mail.

Then, however, it can't connect to the local mail server on william. From my memory of fetchmail, it requires you to run a MTA on the local machine for it to deliver to. Have you remembered to install and start something like postfix, exim, or even sendmail?

My .fetchmailrc on william reads

poll alfred proto IMAP user "tim" password "whatever"

I have no better luck trying to retrieve mail with KMail on the laptop, after adding the following entry to KMail=>Settings=>Configure KMail=>Network=>Receiving

Name: dovecot Login: tim Password: <password> Host: alfred Port: 143 Prefix to folders: /var/spool/mail/

(I also tried with "Prefix to folders:" empty.)

When I start KMail on william I get the message "Checking account dovecot for new mail", but no mail comes over, and I see no error in the log files on either machine (although I may have missed something there).

So long as you have alfred in your /etc/resolv.conf, I can't see any specific reason why this wouldn't work. I have used K-Mail with dovecot quite happily (though I've now moved to using Thunderbird).

Have you subscribed to all of the folders? Though it ought to at least spot the inbox, it's worth double checking.

I should say that I am running Fedora-3 with all programs up-to-date.

Apologies for the long message;

Better to have more information and not need it, than...

Hope I've helped some..

-- Curtis Maloney