If you would prefer to have more fine-grained control of how postie checks for mail or you can’t get the WordPres cron to work, you can also set up a crontab.

If you are using a hosting company that doesn’t allow you access to cron or you don’t want to mess with it you can use a service like SetCronJob.

Setup a cronjob to access get_mail.php – note that every time you access get_mail.php Postie will run – it is like clicking Run Postie on the Admin screen.

Linux

If your site runs on a UNIX/linux server, and you have shell access, you can enable mail checking using cron.

Examples:
This fetches the mail every five minutes with lynx

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/lynx --source http://blog.robfelty.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php >/dev/null 2>&1

This fetches the mail every ten minutes with wget

*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O /dev/null http://blog.robfelty.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php >/dev/null 2>&1

Windows

You will need to install wget or curl.
Then use the Task Scheduler control panel to call wget or curl.
Examples:
wget example

wget http://blog.robfelty.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php

curl example

curl http://blog.robfelty.com/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php