[Dovecot] fetchmail on demand

[John and Catherine Allen]

Graeme Vetterlein wrote:
> I hoping this is an RTFM ... and somebody can point me at the correct 
> 'FM' :-)
> 
> I've just spent a while setting my new Debian , allways-on box in what I 
> suspect is a generally useful configuration.
> 
> I have fetchmail(1) collect mail from many mailboxes via pop3.
> 
> I store these mails in different mboxs according to rules in procmail(1)
> 
> I then offer these out to the household via imap in dovecot(1) .
> 
> 
> I have fetchmail(1) set to poll the ISPs every 5 minutes, this seems to 
> work fine, but there are two issues:
> 
>    1: The constant polling keeps the disk spinning for no good reason 
> (most of the time)
>    2: If I check my mail via a mail reader using imap to the local 
> mboxes ...there could be mail sitting on the ISP servers I don't see 
> (for 5 mins)

Graeme,

I'm surprised that the polling is an issue. I've been running a very 
similar configuration for the family email server since 1999, and 
throughout that time fetchmail has been polling every 2 minutes!

It's true that I've never tried to have the hard disk spin-down on the 
server - it seemed to me that other things would keep it spinning anyway.

One suggestion would be to run the fetchmail on a slug (Linksys NSLU2) 
which can run Debian off a USB memory stick (I have one running like 
this for the last year, doing rsync backups off the server). Then the 
disk activity would be confined to the memory stick.

Still, Dovecot can be made to do almost anything and "When a request 
comes in (via imap) fork off a command who's name is given in the conf 
file.  ... imap_pre_cmd="xxx" " is a neat idea.....

John

--

John and Catherine Allen
Bofferdange, Luxembourg
allen at vo.lu
http://www.homepages.lu/allen