Now when I run fetchmail -d0, it downloads the email from the pop server, but it does not arrive in /home/ash/mail as expected. On looking inside /var/spool/exim I get lots of:
.com [205.158.62.41]: 550 5.1.1 server2@email.com... User unknown
messages. This is for incoming email.
I would take a guess here that it is fetchmail that is incorrectly configured - it hands messages to exim (or other MTA) for delivery and exim expects mail to be addresses to one of the users defined in the /etc/passwd file so if fetchmail gets it wrong then exim will just bounce the mail.
Your fetchmail config file should have something like:
poll server with proto POP3 user 'user.name@isp' there with password secret is 'luser' here
where server and user.name@isp are replaces with details of your mail account with your ISP and luser is your login name in Linux.
That was the cause of the problem (I also had to change a few parts of the exim.conf file to send email correctly through my ISPs SMTP server). Thanks to all that helped.
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Ashley T. Howes PhD www.ashleyhowes.com
"When all the animals of this world are gone, man will die of loneliness"