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[fetchmail]Problem with fetchmail semi-silently ignoring messages

2002-06-14 14:10:11
I raised the following issue with the maintainer of the Debian
fetchmail package; he suggested I mention it here instead.

I use fetchmail to get mail from about 4 POP3 accounts held by
my ISP. Every now and again, I get malformed mail (90% of which
is spam). If this happens, fetchmail decides to ignore it and
not flush it from the POP server. It isn't forwarded into my
local MTA (Exim), but instead a delivery error (General
SMTP/ESMTP error) is sent to me (via Exim). This is OK, as then
I know there is a problem.

But then I have to use a separate program (popcheck in this
instance) to flush the duff message from the POP server,
stopping and starting fetchmail as appropriate. If I don't,
obviously these messages gradually pile up on the POP server.

If the message is spam, this is merely irritating because it's
a hassle. If it's a message from someone I want to talk to who
is unfortunate in that they use a bad MDA/MTA, it's even more
frustrating to get the mail off the POP server and into my
local mail spool.

I'm not sure what the best way round this would be, and it's
already been pointed out to me that allowing fetchmail to fetch
non-standards-compliant mail is not likely to go down well on
this list ;), which I perfectly understand --- non-standards
compliant stuff is likely to confuse the local MTA --- but I
would like a way to both retrieve the mail and/or flush it,
without too much hassle. Can anyone suggest a solution ---
maybe a fetchmail --getmalformedmail option or something that
retrieved malformed mail on the next run of the fetchmail
daemon?

Regards,
Andrew.

-- 
Andrew Ferrier

web:           http://www.new-destiny.co.uk/andrew/
email:         andrew(_dot_)junk(_at_)new-destiny(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk



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