GNet Solutions » FreeBSD Administration

• Table of contents
• Install Getmail
  • Retrieving Emails
  • Automate Getmail

Getmail is a useful tool for fetching mail from a remote mail server and delivering them to local mail account. This is useful for keeping emails concurrent between different mail servers if used as a cron job.

Install Getmail¶

• Update ports tree:
  

  portsnap fetch extract
  

• Install Getmail:
  

  cd /usr/ports/mail/getmail
  make install clean
  

• Prepare getmail environment:
  

  cd
  mkdir .getmail
  cp /usr/local/share/examples/getmail/getmailrc-examples .getmail/getmailrc
  

• Edit the .getmail/getmailrc file to suit your remote servers information.

Retrieving Emails¶

• Create a separate getmail rc file for each account, and run getmail with multiple --rcfile options.
  

  cd ~/.getmail
  mkdir getmail.d
  

• Create first user and deliver using dovecot
  

  vi ~/.getmail/getmail.d/john.getmailrc
  

  • And and the following:
    

    ## john@example.com
    [options]
    verbose = 0
    read_all = false
    delete = false
    
    [retriever]
    type = SimplePOP3Retriever
    server = mail.example.com
    username = john@example.com
    password = Password
    
    [destination]
    type = MDA_external
    path = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver
    arguments = ("-e", "-f", "%(sender)", "-d", "john@altservice.com")
    

• Create next user and deliver to the users Maildir
  

  vi ~/.getmail/getmail.d/bob.getmailrc
  

  • And add the following:
    

    ## bob@example.com
    [options]
    verbose = 0
    read_all = false
    delete = false
    
    [retriever]
    type = SimplePOP3Retriever
    server = mail.example.com
    username = bob@example.com
    password = Password
    
    [destination]
    type = Maildir
    path = /var/vmail/vmail1/example.com/b/o/b/bob-2014.03.29.11.08.32/Maildir
    

Automate Getmail¶

• Of course, it's really easy to script this for a large number of rc-* files. Create a script:
  

  vi /usr/local/bin/run-getmail.sh
  

  • And add the following containing:
    

    #!/bin/sh
    set -e
    cd /var/vmail
    rcfiles="" 
    for file in `ls /var/vmail/.getmail/*.getmailrc` ; do
      rcfiles="$rcfiles --rcfile $file" 
    done
    exec /usr/local/bin/getmail $rcfiles $@
    

• Make the script executable:
  

  chmod +x /usr/local/bin/run-getmail.sh
  

• Edit the vmail crontab:
  

  su - vmail
  crontab -e
  

  • And add the following to run the run-getmail.sh script every 2 minutes.
    

    */2 * * * * /usr/local/bin/run-getmail.sh