fetchmail – run your own mailserver *

fetchmail – run your own mailserver *

This topic is incomplete.

10 August 1998

Fetchmail allows you to retrieve your mail from your ISP and process it locally.   In effect, you are allowing your ISP to be your primary mail server and then you extract the mail from your ISP and process your mail locally.  For more detail about fetchmail, check out the Ports description.

The install

As with my other task today (a port scanner), I followed the instructions found in the FreeBSD handbook for compiling ports from the internet.

During the install, I received the following messages:

Installing fetchmail configurator...
./fetchmailconf /usr/local/bin/fetchmailconf
env: python: No such file or directory

I examined fetchmail and found that I need python.  Oh well, off to install python.

Well, that didn’t work either.  What went wrong?

It seems that this is a known problem.  It tries to install use python, which needs x-windows, but which isn’t installed here.

So I went off and installed the package instead.

Well, I’ve downloaded that.  No luck.  Or rather, no instructions as to what to do once you’ve untarred the file.  Bummer that.

DOH!

You have to do a pkg_add to install a package!  After I did that, it was installed and available for use.  The next step is to configure it.