I have what is a basically always on server acting as my home internet
gateway.
Fetchmail sits as a daemon awaking every 15 minutes and collecting mail for
all the family from the various ISP accounts. It mostly runs for weeks in
this configuration.
I sometimes have problems with my MTA (exim) on this machine which means that
it is not able to take connections on port 25. In these circumstances the
manual says that fetchmail tries to deliver to a precompiled MDA.
I am using Debian (Woody) so I do not know exactly what has been compiled.
However if my MTA has dropped out temporarily for any reason fetchmail seems
to then spawn a "sh" process for every mail it receives and never recovers
from this situation - so that the number of subprocesses of fetchmail slowly
increases.
Is there any command option (I can't find any) or task set up (procmail is
not currently installed but I could install it and then configure it) such
that fetchmail essentially just leaves each message on the server and tries
again on the next 15 minute poll cycle.
In a similar vein - fetchmail seems to sometimes have trouble during the poll
cycle (not sure what - its often in the middle of the night, so my isp may
have taken down the pop server, or it may be that the network interface
[cable modem] is temporarily not working - but fetchmail has just exited.
Can I stop it doing this? - often the first I realise this is the case is
that I haven't received any mail one day.
--
Alan - alan(_at_)chandlerfamily(_dot_)org(_dot_)uk
http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk