Topic: mail retrieval interval

[fastautomation]

Is there anyway of getting sme server to retrieve e-mails from the external host at 5 minute (or less) intervals?

[Stefano]

yes, you need to create a custom template for crontab.. anyway, polling external servers too frequently is not a good idea because:
- there's always the possibility that a fetchmail process can't finish polling in a short interval (think about many accounts and/or big messages)
- from the ISP side, you are consuming a lot of resources

Ciao
Stefano

[CharlieBrady]

If you think you need low latency delivery of mail messages you shouldn't be using an external email server and multidrop fetchmail.

[fastautomation]

Thanks for the advice but you know how clients can be, this particular client has a blackberry that fetches his mail from the ISP, he is moaning that he gets his mail on the blackberry 15 mins before his pc. This is the kind of crap I have to deal with.

[cactus]

Thanks for the advice but you know how clients can be, this particular client has a blackberry that fetches his mail from the ISP, he is moaning that he gets his mail on the blackberry 15 mins before his pc. This is the kind of crap I have to deal with.

Perhaps you can configure his blackbarry to use the SME Server mailserver

[fastautomation]

I thought of that but I can't seem to get that to work either.

If I could just get the sme server to get mails every five minutes it would be fine.

[Stefano]

how do you get mails? are you using smeserver-fetchmail contrib?

if so, you have this template fragment: /etc/e-smith/templates/etc/crontab/FetchMails

- create /etc/e-smith/templates-custom/etc/crontab dir
- copy the fragment in the new folder
- edit as you need/prefer and save
- expand /etc/crontab

you're done

Stefano

[thomasch]

Thanks for the advice but you know how clients can be, this particular client has a blackberry that fetches his mail from the ISP, he is moaning that he gets his mail on the blackberry 15 mins before his pc. This is the kind of crap I have to deal with.

You can't beat push technology with non realtime solutions like fetchmail.
Setting the mail retrieval to every 5 mins won't help. Your client will moans that he get's his mail on BB 5 minutes earlier.

You can set fetchmail to less than 5 min or less as per Stefano instruction, but if the time to retrieve mails is more than 5 mins (i.e lots of big messages) fetchmail will end up with a lot of duplicate zombie thread which do nothing than reporting that another instance is still running.

tom

[CharlieBrady]

You can't beat push technology with non realtime solutions like fetchmail.

The solution is to not use fetchmail. Set the client PC to pull from the ISP, or change mail delivery to the SME server to use SMTP and bypass the mailbox as the ISP.