Re: [Sheflug] Alternatives to Fetchmail

[Richard Stevenson <richard [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Sean

Dare I ask what you're doing in front of a computer on a Friday night?

On Fri, 26 Sep 2003, Sean Liddall wrote:

> Just a quick query re: fetchmail.  Is there an alternative which will allow
> some sort of script to be executed in the event that the service halts or
> dies?
>
> A mate of mine is using it to connect to an exchange server in Sydney to
> download staff email using individual user account authentication methods,
> but occasionally fetchmail hangs and no one is aware of it.  Not being
> terribly proficient with shell scripts - I am curious as to whether it can
> be done with fetchmail - or if an alternative is available.

Depends on what you want the script to do.  If you just want Fetchmail to
recover (or to kill it), make sure you've got a recent version of
Fetchmail and use the timeout option (or the -t <timeout> option on the
commandline).  The manpage states that without this option, Fetchmail
might become stuck indefinitely waiting for a server response.

Or is there something else you want to do?  Apart from nuke the Sexchange
server from orbit, that is...

Cheers

R

-- 
Richard Stevenson

  How was I supposed to know he was an unarmed man? His back was to me.
    -- Axly
___________________________________________________________________

Sheffield Linux User's Group -
http://www.sheflug.co.uk/mailfaq.html

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.