====== Fetchmail ======

Fetchmail is an open source piece of software which can be used to retrieve mail from a remote POP or IMAP server and forward the mail to another address or the local mail box.


The benefit of this for Compsoc users is to allow you to get your college email and other email account delivered to you Compsoc account. Or to an existing email account that you like using such as GMAIL.


====== Getting Started ======
 
What you will need in order to have your college email delivered somewhere other than the nasty webmail interface that they are offering. 

Your College User name (Your Student ID)
And your college/webmail Password.

Also you will want to know what email address you want to forward your email to.

You need to start by creating a **.fetchmailrc** file in your home directory.
Then copy and paste this in and edit the values. you will need to change the student ID (username) password and which email account you want the mail passed to.

<cli>
poll beacon.nuigalway.ie with proto IMAP
user "12345678" there with password "nuns4runs" is change-me@example.com here options fetchall warnings 3600
</cli>

The above script will take all email from the server and pass it to your email account. The fetchall option will not leave a copy of the mail on the server.

In order to run the program you need to call fetchmail

<cli>
$ fetchmail
</cli>

It will show an output of mails been fetched and any errors that have occoured. Once you are happy with this you can turn it into a daemon by issuing some CMD line arguments.

<cli>
$ fetchmail -d 300
</cli>

This will get the service to wake up every 5 minutes (5 x 60s = 300s) and check for new emails.