fetchmail finding downloaded mail

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:36:19 -0400, Alex wrote:

> Hi,
> It's been some time since I've used fetchmail, but I'm trying to
> configure it again to backup my gmail account, and I can't figure out
> where it's stored my downloaded mail. I'm using fedora20 and the
> latest version of fetchmail.
> 
> I'm first trying to get it to download a single message from Trash as a test:
> 
> $ cat .fetchmailrc
> poll imap.gmail.com protocol IMAP
>    user "mysqlstudent at gmail.com" is alex here
>    password 'mypass123'
>    folder 'Trash'
>    fetchlimit 1
>    keep
>    ssl
> 
> I've configured postfix on my local machine, and removed sendmail.
> Postfix is running. Running "fetchmail -v" shows that it did download
> the message, but I don't know where it put it. It's not in
> /var/spool/mail/alex or anywhere in my home directory.

fetchmail by default talks to the MTA on port 25.

If you don't like the default, you could use the "mda" option to point
it at your preferred MDA directly. Note that if you don't deliver your
fetched message to a queue, mail can be lost if there are permission
problems or lack of storage space. Usually, I add
 
  mda "/usr/bin/procmail -t -f -"

to ~/.fetchmailrc to deliver to procmail directly (which stores in the
local mailbox even if there are no custom recipes in the .procmailrc).