fetchmail and plain text password

[Roland Smith]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 03:15:53PM +0000, Anton Shterenlikht wrote:
> I use fetchmail
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mail-fetchmail.html
> to download all my mail from the Uni mail
> server to my fbsd box.
> 
> I typically run it in daemon mode, which requires
> having my mail server password in plain text in .fetchmailrc
> 
> I'm a little worried about the security of having
> my password in plain text on the system.

chown you:yourgroup ~/.fetchmailrc
chmod 400 ~/.fetchmailrc

With these changes, only you and the superuser can read that file. 

You could put your /home directory on an ecrypted partition, so that
~/.fetchmailrc is only readable when /home is mounted. Note that this only
provides protection after the machine has been powered down.

> Is there a more secure arrangement that would
> still allow running fetchmail in daemon mode?

I'd be more worried that your password is sent as plaintext over the network
using e.g. POP3. You should use the --ssl option if your mailserver allows it.

> Or maybe there is another software solution
> alltogether?

Presumably you are running a mailserver on your box. You can ask the
administrator to forward mail to your machine by making an MX record for it.

Roland
-- 
R.F.Smith                                   http://www.xs4all.nl/~rsmith/
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