On Tue, 18 Jul 2000, Barry Samuels wrote: > I normally work within a window manager environment (mostly KDE) when > using Debian Potato and have used KMail to download mail directly from my > ISP pop3 accounts. > > I recently decided to setup fetchmail to poll my pop3 mail servers in the > background, download any waiting mail and pass it on to procmail for > sorting into appropriate folders and then access these folders using KMail. > > This works well but I have realised recently that, because this is now > happening in the background, if I disconnect from my ISP without > thinking I can cut a mail download off in mid-stream. I have half an > e-mail to prove it. > > Can anyone suggest a way to prevent this apart from running Fetchmail > manually? > > Barry Samuels >
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of ways around this. What I do is to use diald to allow on demand connections to my ISP. I then have a cron job that runs fetchmail periodically to get the mail about 4 times a day. Additionally I wrote a little perl script that runs when I log in (started by kde) that will get mail if the network connection is up every 10 minutes. diald is a nice solution as you are not controlling connection. When fetchmail, or any other application requiring network access, is finished, diald will end the connection. diald allows one to do other things automatically also. I run leafnode so my machine is a USENET news server. leafnode gets the news in the middle of the night and I can read it from a local disk whenever I want to and not have to put up with downloading news in real time.
