On Tue, 22 Sep 2009 12:46:27 +0100, Stroller wrote:

> The notion of daemon mode bothers me, because it must be run by root

Users can run in daemon mode too, although that means you'll have one
daemon running for each user.
 
> (IIRC) and the various users all put their separate private email  
> passwords in a single file in /etc 

You can omit the passwords from fetchmailrc and include them in individual
user's .netrc files,according to the man page.

"If you do not specify a password, and fetchmail cannot extract one from
your ~/.fetchmailrc file,  it  will  look  for  a ~/.netrc file in your
home directory before requesting one interactively; if an entry matching
the mailserver is found in that file, the password will be used.
Fetchmail first looks for a match on poll name; if it finds none, it
checks for  a match on via name."


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Unsupported service (adj): Broken (see Demon)