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[fetchmail]Fetchmail dies silently in daemon mode on HP-UX 10.20

2002-04-30 02:20:50
Dear fetchmailers,

Recently our sysadmin switched the mail delivery system from a Sun
machine to a Microsoft Exchange server. I was in a desparate need for
revival of my procmail scripts that originally were triggered by mail
arriving at the NFS-mounted box. Mounting the server's local disk is not
an option, so I had to arrange a local mail delivery.

I believe fetchmail is the best choice for this very task, so I downloaded
the latest dev version (fetchmail-5.9.10 at the time) and built it on my
local machine with gcc 2.8.1.

The sysadmin was kind enough to install procmail on my box.

I am not granted the root access, so I can't use cron nor configure
sendmail as procmail's local source; I have to run fetchmail in the daemon
mode and mention procmail explicitly as the mail delivery agent in
$HOME/.fetchmailrc. The contents of my .fetchmailrc are appended to the
end of this mail for your reference.

First of all, fetchmail-5.9.10 disappears in daemon mode without dumping a
core or logging a record in the log file. The same refers to the latest
version, fetchmail-5.9.11. The only remnant of running the daemon is a
stale .fetchmail.pid file.

I had to fall back to your "gold" release fetchmail-5.9.0. This works,
although not without a flaw: the fetchmail daemon keeps alive but does
not draw mail from the remote server. Only the "nodetach" option makes
fetchmail to behave, so I applied the recommendation found in the FAQ:

   As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an ampersand to
   background it. A Sun user recommends this:

            (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)

This solution is not perfect since it always returns exit code 0 no matter
if fetchmail succeeded or not, so it is difficult for using in a script
like .login.

There is another minor drawback: fetchmail passes my own login name to
the MDA but not the real From address. The FAQ reads:

   Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall back to
   the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky, the log
   will look right.

My procmail listener seems to be not picky at all, but is still logs
every piece of e-mail as coming from myself.

Any hint will be appreciated. I'll be glad to supply more info if needed.
Please answer to me directly since I am not subscribed to the fetchmail-
friends mailing list.

Just for reference, the remote server is Microsoft Exchange IMAP4rev1
server version 5.5.2654.89 operating in IMAP.

Here goes .fetchmailrc:

set no bouncemail
set invisible
set logfile ${HOME}/mail/fetchmail.log
poll tpa-mail1 protocol IMAP
localdomains telrad.co.il telradnetworks.co.il
password ********
pass8bits
#bsmtp -
idle
#keep
mda "/usr/bin/procmail -t -f %F -d %T 2>>${HOME}/mail/fetchmail.log"

-- 
Regards,                                                |       /^^^\
        Yury                                            |     (| , , |)
                                                        |      |  *  |
E-mail: yury.burkatovsky at telrad dot co dot il        |       \_-_/



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