I'd like to contribute by following up my own posting.
The daemon's death seems to be a feature, not a bug :)
Originally the .fetchmailrc file had a record
set logfile ${HOME}/mail/fetchmail.log
and did not have "set syslog". Fetchmail does not substitute anything in
.fetchmailrc with the current env vars, so it looked for a file with
explicit name '${HOME}/mail/fetchmail.log' in the current directory and
of course did not find it. The daemon could not breathe without a
receiver of its stderr/stdout turnout, this was why it died.
The following passage in the man page can be related to the death, though
the connection with my case is quite vague IMO:
If you modify a ~/.fetchmailrc while a background instance is
running and break the syntax, the background instance will die
silently. Unfortunately, it can't die noisily because we don't yet
know whether syslog should be enabled.
I always restarted fetchmail from a terminal window with the --nodetach
option, redirected stdout/stderr into ~/mail/fetchmail.log, and that worked.
After adding "set syslog" fetchmail could survive and even drew the mail
out of the remote box somehow, but the MDA was invoked without an open
stdin, thus the clutter in the console window.
Setting logfile to /full/path/to/homedir/mail/fetchmail.log was the cure.
I do not need "set syslog" in .fetchmailrc any more and the program has
been working smoothly.
Hope this will be of some help for newbies like me :)
--
Regards, | /^^^\
Yury | (| , , |)
| | * |
E-mail: yury.burkatovsky at telrad dot co dot il | \_-_/
On Thu, 2 May 2002, Yury Burkatovsky wrote:
I added "set syslog" to my .fetchmailrc file, and fetchmail-5.9.11 daemon
no longer dies.
When I invoke fetchmail-5.9.11 daemon with double -v option, it also
works, but the console window is cluttered up with an error message in
effect to "procmail[]: Descriptor 1 was not open" on every poll.