Can you fix my email?

February 21, 2006 3:30 PM

I have a POP email account and an IMAP email account...how do I send the POP email to the IMAP account?

I have a "Member" Account from Fastmail.fm, and an account with hosting provider DotEasy. I can only access the DotEasy email via POP, while the awesome Fastmail.fm lets me use IMAP...how can I siphon the DotEasy emails into the Fastmail.fm, without using DotEasy's forwarding?

DotEasy consistently fails at forwarding email, and bounces it back to the sender. According to Google, I'm not the only one with this problem.

Fastmail.fm only polls POP accounts every 2 hours, which is too disconnected for me.

Is there a service (free, please?) that I can feed my POP account details to which downloads them and sends them to my Fastmail.fm account? Is there any other solution?

I currently move emails manually at home in the evening, but I use many computers during the day, and I have come to really love IMAP. Any ideas?

posted by bkudria to Computers & Internet (17 answers total)

If you have it saved locally, most email clients will support just a drag and drop from a local folder to your imap folder. Thunderbird does this just fine.
posted by blueplasticfish at 3:32 PM on February 21, 2006

Second what blueplasticfish said.

Set up the Fastmail.fm account as an IMAP account in Thunderbird.
Set up the DotEasy account as a POP account.

POP the mail.
Drag & Drop it to the IMAP account.

Works like a charm. Using Thunderbird is suggested because the way it displays folders is nice & clean, unlike other apps. :-)
posted by drstein at 3:39 PM on February 21, 2006

Response by poster: That's what I do currently, but I only have access to my mail *client* at home, in the evening...
At work, or at school, I can only access the web mail interfaces, and there's no drag and drop there. I could log into my DE web mail and forward messages, but again, that is manual, and would give me icky Fwd: in the subject lines.
posted by bkudria at 3:39 PM on February 21, 2006

Best answer: This is pretty much what fetchmail was designed to do. Put it in your crontab and run it every 5 minutes, or however often you desire.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:40 PM on February 21, 2006

Response by poster: Rhomboid, nice try.
I have ass-slow dial up at home, and my provider likes to disconnect me every once in a while.
posted by bkudria at 3:42 PM on February 21, 2006

Oh and insert the standard rant about how regular POP3 is insecure, your login name and password are in cleartext for anyone to see, this is horrible, nobody should use this, etc. At least try to use one of the secure POP variants.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:44 PM on February 21, 2006

You don't have to run fetchmail at home. You can run it from any system, it need not be run on the source or destination machine.
posted by Rhomboid at 3:45 PM on February 21, 2006

Response by poster: Rhomboid: If I had a choice, I wouldn't use it.

I'm looking to see if I can install fetchmail on my DE account, but I'm pretty sure I can't. If I can, you get best answer. If not, I'll post another reply.
posted by bkudria at 3:55 PM on February 21, 2006

Response by poster: No luck. DE doesn't do cron jobs, and they are not going to install fetchmail for me, they said.
posted by bkudria at 4:01 PM on February 21, 2006

At school? If you mean a university, they usually provide students with a unix shell account, even though most people don't use them . Could you inquire with your school about running fetchmail? Their network is always on.
posted by team lowkey at 5:30 PM on February 21, 2006

Read the Fastmail.FM docs.

They'll do this for you.

http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqparts/PopLinks.htm#PopScreen
posted by Caviar at 6:31 PM on February 21, 2006

Response by poster: team lowkey: Nope, high school. :)

Caviar: Did you read my question? I mentioned that Fastmail.fm only does it in 2-hour intervals, which is not enough for me.
posted by bkudria at 7:09 PM on February 21, 2006

That section says you can hit the retrieve button at any time to pick up outstanding messages from the pop server instead of waiting for the poll. Does that not work for you?
posted by Caviar at 7:25 PM on February 21, 2006

Response by poster: Caviar: Sorry, not quite. It is manual, I'm really looking for a automatic solution. A silver bullet, if you will. I've already looked through all the FM FAQs without finding anything.
posted by bkudria at 4:59 AM on February 22, 2006

Well, you really only have three possible solutions.

1) Run something at Fastmail.FM to suck down the mail.

2) Run something at DotEasy to forward the mail.

3) Run something somewhere else to retrieve the mail from DotEasy and bounce it to Fastmail.FM.

I can't think of anything offhand that will let you do this for free, but you could get a $10/month Dreamhost account and set something up there.

I think your best bet is to talk to the folks at Fastmail.FM and see if they'll install fetchmail for you (it should be running there, and not at DotEasy), or if there's any way to increase the polling frequency.
posted by Caviar at 8:45 AM on February 22, 2006

Response by poster: Caviar: Thanks for the clarification. FastMail.fm will let me increase the polling frequency ... if I upgrade my membership. To get a 1-hour polling frequency, I need to pay $40/year. Not ideal.

2) It would be great if DE's forwarding just worked. It doesn't, according to Google, for a lot of other people.

3) If you can't find anything, I give up. I was hoping the responses to this thread would point to such a free service. Even $10/month is too much for me.

Thanks anyway!
posted by bkudria at 2:58 PM on February 22, 2006

Response by poster: Rhomboid: I ended up using fetchmail. Thanks!
posted by bkudria at 3:58 AM on February 28, 2006