[ale] fetchmail right tool?

[Chris Ricker]

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Vincent Fox wrote:

> Okay I have a problem that I am stuck on, perhaps someone has a better idea?
> 
> A user comes to me wanting to download and archive nearly 8,000 messages
> off a shared mail account.  Main goal is to archive this old messages,
> clean the account down to only the last few months of messages.
> 
> The first thing that occurs to me is to use fetchmail.
> 
> However fetchmail expects a local MTA to deliver to. So I start up
> postfix on the local machine (localhost-only access) and fire a fetchmail.
> A quick hack, and I think a the time a simple and safe one.
> 
> Since this is a shared account that it's coming from, it seems like
> all the To: and Cc: info is causing bounces however to get delivered
> back to the senders. So some of the senders into this account
> get 50-200 bounces of messages from 2 years ago. They call wondering
> WTF is going on with this rogue mailserver.
> 
> OOPS!
> 
> Anyone got a better idea? Way to have fetchmail just dump the silly
> things into one big local mbox file instead of looping to an MTA?

fetchmail can hand off to a local MDA instead of a local MTA. That would
seem more what you're wanting, though you have to be careful how you invoke
the MDA....

fetchmail ... -m "/path/to/mda mda-options"

later,
chris