fetchmail-friends
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [fetchmail]exit on "couldn't find canonical DNS name"

2001-03-23 00:06:40
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
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.