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The problem with Mail.app
Authored by: el bid on Apr 22, '02 05:00:00PM

I'm not entirely sure why this fix in necessary -- why not just leave Mail.app running with the timed fetch option switched on?

The problem I have, which touches on all this, is that the collection of email from my three or four ISPs will fairly often throw up an error -- usually just a fetch that has timed out. This in itself isn't a problem -- a UNIX-type system should normally just log the error and do a retry next time around. But Mail.app, alas, insists on turning it (almost literally) into a song and dance, with the Dock Icon doing a jitterbug until I bring Mail.app into focus and dismiss the error dialogue.

So I don't set up Mail.app to collect the mail automatically, and this neat scripted fetcher isn't going to help either.

A better solution (which I've implemented but not yet polished) would be to use fetchmail not just to check the existence of unread mail, but to download it too, to a UNIX mail directory. Then Mail.app can be used to collect automatically from that directory. As this should never throw up any errors, those irritating "Uncontrollable Fits of Interactivity" will be circumvented.

--
el bid




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The problem with Mail.app
Authored by: adriaant on Apr 22, '02 05:58:07PM
Of course you can use fetchmail to retrieve mail and drop it in a Unix box! You don't even need to run a cron job using a script, because fetchmail can retrieve mail periodically already. For example, the following .fetchmailrc will retrieve POP mail every 300 secs:
set postmaster "user"
set daemon 300 #poll every 300 secs
poll your.mail.server with proto POP3
        user "user" there with password "passw" is "login" here options stripcr
This will drop mail in your "user" UNIX mailbox, which you can then read in with Mail.app.

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