1. Log on to your 1and1 server using SSH, the program I use for this is PuTTY. You enter the username and password for SSH access to your site (found in your 1and1 control panel-administration-web space & access-Secure Shell Access) in the PuTTY command prompt and then logon your site. The next two steps you have to go through are:
a. to find the location of your current directory: enter “pwd” to find this… mine was: “/kunden/homepages/XX/dXXXXXXXX/htdocs”
b. to find the location of php on your machine to do this I entered the command “php -info” in the command prompt and looked for the location in the output which was: “/usr/local/bin/php” however due to the nature of 1and1 hosting sometimes the full path is actually “/kunden/usr/local/bin/php”
2. Next create your crontab file. You can find out more about the *’s from the crontab page on wikipedia. So I entered the command “crontab -e” (which means edit crontab) and entered the line(use command “i” to edit and when finished “esc-key” and then “:wq” to save and exit):
“* * * * * /usr/local/bin/php /kunden/homepages/XX/dXXXXXXXX/htdocs/support/cron/index.php > /dev/null” all on one line.
This command means at every minute, every hour on every day using the program found at /usr/local/bin/php (sometimes /kunden/usr/local/bin/php) executes the file found at /kunden/homepages/XX/dXXXXXXXX/htdocs/support/cron/index.php and send the output to the location /dev/null (which means get rid of the output).
Using this command I found that on 1and1 hosting my pop/imap emails were fetched between every 1 and 2 minutes.