From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr(_at_)thyrsus(_dot_)com>
Still a bad idea. Such unresolved hosts would never be queried for the
rest of the fetchmail daemon's lifetime -- you'd invisibly fail to get
mail that was waiting for you.
Ok, so why not arrange it so that if it fails to resolve a host, it waits
for a definable period (defaulting to, say, an hour) and then trys again.
Errors should be made obvious so they can be fixed oor worked around.
I'd agree, but stopping ALL incoming email just because one host is broken
is a significant pain. If a DNS lookup fails, why not simply stick an entry
in the log and drop the defined postmaster a warning (rate limited of
course). Drop them a new message when things start working again.
I've been through the pain of this recently, but because of the way
fetchmail works it was mostly invisible to me that things had stopped. The
local area had suffered a power outage during the night. All my systems
recovered quite happily and I was none the wiser.
However, at the same time one of my mailhosts didn't resolve, so fetchmail
refused to start. Since I have quiet email days (now and again) I didn't
pay to much attention until 2 days had gone by...
For my 2 <insert small denomination coin here> worth, why not provide it as
an option - one that by default is disabled? That way, almost everybody
"wins".
Rob
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