Best way to check mail messages frequently, but not constantly

[e1-531g]

Hi,
I would like to check my mail messages one or two times a day. I was thinking about writing shell script & cron to do this, but maybe somebody have written software for this and I will be reinventing the wheel.
I would like to not constantly be online, because this distracts.

[jggimi]

See the biff(1) and xbiff(1) man pages.

[IdOp]

Perhaps e1-531g means checking for mail at a remote mail server?

I do this every 10 minutes using a shell script and cron. The script tries to determine if I'm online, and if so runs fetchmail(1) to check for and retrieve mail.

[jggimi]

I use xbiff(1) on a workstation via a secure* NFS mounted /var/mail served from my MTA.

---

* This used to be NFS tunneled via IPSec, later replaced by a dedicated VLAN.

[e1-531g]

As IdOp suggested, I want to check incoming emails from remote mail server via IMAP over TLS.
Thanks IdOp for information about fetchmail.

[J65nko]

Several years ago I wrote a guide : Using fetchmail as IMAP client to download mail from a Gmail folder(label)

Maybe that gives a start

[e1-531g]

Thank you all, especially J65nko.

[e1-531g]

What:
1. Mail delivery agents
2. Mail retrieval agents
are you use personally and are available in OpenBSD base or packages?

I am thinking about fetchmail, but Wikipedia is saying that in past there were a little of security holes.
I have accounts in US's Yahoo and Russia's Yandex.

Do you use mbox or maildir for personal use cases?

[IdOp]

For sending mail I use sendmail on Linux and postfix on NetBSD.

For retrieval I use fetchmail. I'm not particularly attached to it, but can get it to do what I need. What I find most frustrating about it is the documentation, especially concerning ssl, tls and so on.

I store mail in an mbox, which probably makes me hopelessly stuck in the past. I often find it difficult to change, and also try to avoid getting too much email which perhaps makes it workable.

[e1-531g]

I am the most interested in retrieval part.
Do you use any MDA/local delivery agent for some form of sorting, filtering etc? For example I would like to download only attachments from one of my mailbox and only emails without attachments from another.
Example with getmail I have found:

[destination]
type = MDA_external
path = /usr/bin/procmail

and for fetchmail:

mda "/usr/bin/procmail -f %F -d %T";

For TLS I am going to use relayd's relay and I even have it working, but without verification of certificates. I am going to investigate this further, but suggest not focus on this in this thread.

I am more interested in LDA/MDA & MRA tools and mbox & maildir storages.

[IdOp]

Yes, I do also use procmail. One thing I get it to do is beep when an email comes in.

You might also want to take a quick look at this thread. One thing mentioned there is nmh. I seem to recall some of the folks here discussing doing interesting things with nmh on another thread, which I can't find using the search feature.