On Sun, 2005-04-17 at 13:08 -0400, Claude Jones wrote: > On Sun April 17 2005 11:20 am, Alexander Dalloz wrote: > > > > While I do not fully understand what you are doing there with the > > script, I think you should spent some efforts to improve the script or > > mechanism to not produce the amount of unwanted cronjob messages. Sound > > like big nonsense to run a script every 5 minutes which produces a bunch > > of error mail messages, then to forward them to a different account > > where to silently delete them. Be friendly to your and your internet > > partner (ISP et al.) resources. > > > > My fault. Here, from the GotMail home page: > > "Gotmail is a perl script to download mail from hotmail.com without user > interaction. It is probably best run from a cron job." > > That's what it is. It uses Posix and SendMail, apparently. It goes out to my > hotmail account, gets the messages, forwards them to my regular email > address. Here's a sample message that it generates each time it runs: > > Starting sendmail: [ OK ] > Starting sm-client: [ OK ] > Gotmail v0.8.2 Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Peter Hawkins > Gotmail comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. > This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it > under certain conditions; see the file COPYING for details. > > Getting hotmail index page... > Processing java check.... > Logging in... > Following redirect... > Going to Inbox Page: http://by21fd.bay21.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/HoTMail > Loading main display... > $folder_index_url->/cgi-bin/folders? > Loading folder list... > Processing Folder: "Inbox", Total messages: 0, Unread messages: 0. > Loading folder "Inbox" page 1... > Processing Folder: "Sent Messages", Total messages: 0, Unread messages: 0. > Loading folder "Sent Messages" page 1... > Processing Folder: "Drafts", Total messages: 0, Unread messages: 0. > Loading folder "Drafts" page 1... > Processing Folder: "Junk E-Mail", Total messages: 0, Unread messages: 0. > Loading folder "Junk E-Mail" page 1... > > All done! > Shutting down sendmail: [ OK ] > Shutting down sm-client: [ OK ] > > I don't see anything to tell me that these are 'errors' as you suggest. Am I > missing something? I check this very often, because this happens to be an > account that I use for extensive tech-support in my business, and I'm often > in dialogue with someone, and on deadline, and prompt receipt of replies is > important to me. If there's a way to 'silently' execute the cronjob without > resultant messages, I'm all ears. This is the GotMail home page, if anyone is > interested, though it appears to be broken today - none of the links seem to > be working: > http://sourceforge.net/projects/gotmail > I could post the perl script, but it's rather long, so I'll hold off unless > someone would like to see it. I also use gotmail (I've packaged up RPMs for it at http://www.city- fan.org/ftp/contrib/mail/) and I also run it from cron. Instead of redirecting the output to the bit bucket (/dev/null), I redirect it into a log file in my home directory: $ crontab -l # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall. # (/tmp/crontab.6180 installed on Wed Sep 22 14:41:47 2004) # (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $) 59 * * * * date >> $HOME/gotmail.log 2>&1 */10 * * * * gotmail >> $HOME/gotmail.log 2>&1 This runs gotmail every ten minutes and inserts a "date" tag into the log file every hour. If mail stops turning up for some reason (e.g. hotmail change their page format so that gotmail can't read it), I can look at the log and get an idea of when that started happening. I'll also see any other error reports that might appear if I scan through the log from time to time, looking for anything unusual. Paul. -- Paul Howarth <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
