[fetchmail]Fetchmail daemon mode

[Matthias Andree]

"Bill Greganti" <t20030101@greganti.com> writes:

>> Please do not run fetchmail as root. Copy your /etc/fetchmailrc
>> settings into the user's ~/.fetchmailrc and remove /etc/fetchmailrc.
>
> Actually, the daemon runs as the user fetchmail by default, not as
> root.

Is this something you're doing explicitly? Just running fetchmail as
root user will not drop privileges.

> I did see a similar script in the archives, I'll go back and find it.  I
> didn't like that approach simply because of the number of fetchmail
> processes running.

Then run them round-robin according to a particular schedule, with
explicitly giving -d0 to override possible "set daemon 600" options in
user configuration files. This also defangs nonsense such as "set daemon
1" which would put fetchmail in a tight loop.

> daemon would process mail constantly.  In this case multiple daemons might
> be more efficient.

Particularly if polling multiple upstream servers.

> Not being real familiar with fetchmail yet, does anyone see a problem with
> thousands of processes running?

You don't want to do that on very old operating systems or if you're
short on memory.

> Also, in the spirit of using a single fetchmail process against the advice
> given, does anyone see problem with writing a script to conpile all of the
> ~/.fetchmailrc files into /etc/fetchmailrc?

A server that causes timeouts delays mail for all other users, with many
servers to poll up to the point where a single run of that single run
control file takes longer to process than your users are willing to
accept.

-- 
Matthias Andree