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[fetchmail]How to allow multiple simultaneous fetchmails for one system user

2001-08-15 16:53:02
Before anybody thinks I'm a clueless newbie who doesn't read documentation,
yes, I know that it's a feature of fetchmail to only allow one instance of
fetchmail per system user, and I also understand the reasoning behind this.
However, this feature is hampering my ability to use fetchmail as I would
like.

My company's email system stores everything server-side: messages,
preferences, everything (we have our own email client as well).  In
addition to handling email specific to the company's domain, we wish to
offer retrieval of email from other remote accounts as well, via POP3. 
Because these messages should not be downloaded straight to a person's
machine, but instead to the email server, fetchmail is an obvious choice
for implementing this feature.

The first challenge stemmed from the fact that people do not have direct
access to our email servers; they retrieve email via IMAP and send email
via SMTP.  The solution to this challenge was to create a new network
service that would run fetchmail on their behalf.  When somebody requests
retrieval of their POP3 email, the "fetch daemon" accepts the person's
info, and spawns a fetchmail process with the appropriate arguments. 
fetchmail then does its usual thing of making a POP3 connection, reading
any new messages available, and feeding them to the SMTP server.

This all works fine, except, because every fetchmail process is being
created by the fetch daemon, they are all owned by the same system user. 
This creates a new challenge:  Only one person at a time can actually make
use of POP3 retrieval!

So, I would like to remove the limitation of only one fetchmail process per
system user.  The only negative effect I can see is opening up the
possibility of more than one connection to a POP3 server, using the same
user name.  fetchmail wouldn't be able to completely close this possibility
anyway, plus any self-respecting POP3 server should be prepared to deal any
such attempts.

Are there any other repercussions I should be aware of?  If not, clues on
where to look to make sure all checks are removed would be appreciated, as
I'm on a tight deadline to get this working.

Thanks for any help!

---Kris Kelley



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