| |
Introduction
Fetchmail is an application that retrieve email from one or more email accounts and forwards the email to another account.
Why?
| 1 - | Monitor multiple email accounts from a single inbox. |
| 2 - | Fight spam by setting up temporary or "throw away" email accounts on yahoo.com, or gmail.com or other free email services. Then using this application, have those emails forwarded to your primary email address. That way you can protect your primary email address and give out the throw away addresses and still receive all your email at your primary address. Then if you ever receive an unsolicited email, or you just want to stop receiving emails from a specific source, you simply go out to this application and remove the forward. |
| |
| 3 - | Use this application to move all your email from 1 account to another. If you change ISP's, or decide to ditch your gmail account ( maybe to move to your ISP's email account because google and yahoo read your email ) or any other reason you change your primary email address, you can take your old email with you and continue to monitor your old email account from the new address. |
| 4 - | Setup group email accounts that multiple people can sign up to monitor. Email sent to the 1 address gets forwarded to each person who signed up for it. |
How It Works
| This application uses the fetchmail utilty program that comes standard on many types of Linux. My $10.99 a month subscription to Network Solutions to run this web site doesn't give me a Linux shell though, so I'm pulling the forward data off this web server to my back end Redhat server to perform the actual fetchmail process. ( probably safer to do behind a firewall anyway ) | |
| | |
| The backend app creates temporary Linux accounts and puts a .forward file in the users home directory. Then by calling the fetchmail utility all mail from the target address is pulled down to the Linux server and automatically forwarded to the users email address, not stopping on the Linux server. | |
Written and developed by
Dave Sailors
Also available in https,
but you'll have to trust my self signed cert.
Last updated 04/09/2014.
|