Downloading Mail: Fetchmail

Fetchmail is included on all Linux distributions worth their salt these days, but you have to write your own configuration file to provide the parameters for the download. Fortunately, it's easy. In your home directory you should create a dot file (configuration file) by the name of .fetchmailrc. In it, provide your download information. Fetchmail is well documented, so either start with your system's sample fetchmail file (/etc/fetchmailrc) or read the man page for fetchmail to get an idea of all the things fetchmail is capable of.

For any POP3 account I've ever had, all I've needed has been something like the following:

#Randymon Fetchmail config file for the Woodnotes Guide
poll mail.myisp.com with protocol pop3 user NAME 
      with pass PASSWORD is randymon here;

to indicate my login name, login password, and local machine account (the name I log in to my Linux box with). To get my mail, I open up a terminal and download my mail by entering the command `fetchmail.' Some distros like SUSE set up your machine so your mail is automatically downloaded every time you establish an internet connection.

When you sit down at your computer you can open up a terminal and first run fetchmail, then run mutt. Or you can start with mutt, and run fetchmail by entering:

! fetchmail

The exclamation point is the mechanism for getting to a shell from within mutt and after the exclamation point you could easily input any shell command you like (less, sort, ls, vim, etc.)