On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 08:15, Bryan Phinney wrote: > On Thursday 30 October 2003 08:49 pm, Praedor Atrebates wrote: > > Thanks. Unfortunately, that doesn't make it any better than running it as > > a cron job. My desire is that no matter how many users are using, only ONE > > fetchmail process is needed. Instead of all users running their own > > fetchmail, have the system run ONE and have this one process check for > > ~/.fetchmailrc files in all user directories and go from there. As a new > > user creates a .fetchmailrc, the fetchmail daemon would simply find it and > > use it on the next fetch. > > Fetchmail can be run as a user and will pull from the ~/.fetchmailrc file of > the user it is run as. So, you can have user controlled processes of > fetchmail. You can not have user controlled daemon processes of fetchmail > because this would violate security features to not allow users to have root > access. > > > > From your answer I assume that fetchmail is not capable of this. To my > > thinking, this is a flaw in design. Instead of designing a system that > > requires each and every user run independent instances of fetchmail, it is > > self evident that a single process handling the mail for any and all users > > is more logical and clean in design. > > Well, not giving users root access to a daemon may seem like a design flaw to > you, but it certainly doesn't to me. And I also agree that a single process > handling mail for all users is more logical which is why fetchmail is > designed to do exactly that. It does not, however, include giving control of > that process to the user themselves, since that would provide a hook for a > user to potentially gain higher than their user level of access. Centralized > processing should always be controlled by a central administrator with access > handed out only as needed and as limited as it can be. > > > Fetchmail can't do this? Is there a > > fetchmail-alike that can? > > I do not know of any. You may want to inquire on the Fetchmail mailing-list, > they would be experts and might have some suggestions.
Here I see two different philosophies: .- The one used by fetchmail, in which you can either start it as a daemon and have a centralized administration, usually on /etc/fetchmailrc, or start it as a cron job leaving to each user the task of maintaining his/her own ~/.fetchmailrc. .- The other one, used by procmail, which is almost like fetchmail's, but you may also include the ~/.procmailrc recipes with a line in /etc/procmailrc: INCLUDERC=/home/$USER/.procmailrc There is a trade off: if you choose centralized administration you lower the risk of breaking something but increase the the administrative burden on root and vice versa. I think that procmail philosophy give the administrator more choices, something that most linux users love. Adolfo
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