Hello Fetchmail Friends!
After reading through the FAQ and the very extensive manual,
I'm still a little bit confused how the current version of
Fetchmail works. ;-)
What I want to do is very simple. Fetch mail from a POP3 account
and then deliver it to another account via SMTP.
This works fine as long as the delivery to the SMTP server
succeeds, but it behaves "confusing" if the SMTP server refuses
the mail for some reason.
I'm happy for any type of help (maybe I just overlooked some
cool options. ;-)
1. By default, it deletes mail.
What surprises me most is the fact that fetchmail's default
configuration is to delete any undeliverable mail without
any notification when the transfer to the destination
SMTP server fails with certain error codes.
The manual calls it "antispam" feature, but - for example -
getting an SMTP error code 550 doesn't necessarily mean that
it's spam. It could be a syntactically incorrect header, or a
temporary DNS problem.
Okay, this can be disabled with "antispam -1" (what only seems
to work if used in the fetchmailrc file, but not if used on the
command line ;-) I had expected that "antispam -1" is the
default (because it's much safer this way).
2. How to disable bounces?
If the "antispam" feature is disabled, a bounce is generated
for an undeliverable mail.
Fetchmail tries to find the sender of the mail and sends the
bounce back to that address.
Especially in spam messages, both addresses are mostly fake.
Sometimes the addresses are just invalid, but sometimes these
are existing addresses (of innocent people on the net) that
were misused by the spammer (because he needed to specify a
valid address - of course, not his own - so that mail servers
won't reject it). I guess, those people are not really
interested in bounces because it wasn't them who sent the
original mail. ;-)
An option would be nice to avoid bounces totally, because I guess
that in most cases the original sender is not interested in any
problems that occured while I transfer my mail from a remote POP3
server to my local SMTP server.
(The --nobounce option still sends bounces, but to the postmaster
who typically doesn't care much about a user's problem with his
fetchmail installation. Think of a multi-user system. ;-)
3. Delivery failure report?
Instead of bounces to the original sender, a delivery failure
report (to a defined mail address on a per user basis) would
be more helpful.
The original sender cannot do much about my fetchmail problems.
But the final receiver (the person that should have got the
mail via the SMTP server -- me! ;-) is the person that is interested
most in any problems that happened during the fetchmail process.
Currently, the final receiver has no idea that there was failed
mail delivery. A meaningful notification would be very nice, IMHO.
Greetings, Andreas
PS: I'm not on "fetchmail-friends(_at_)lists(_dot_)ccil(_dot_)org" (but I used
it
because it was suggested in the manual for questions and bug
reports). Please don't forget to include my personal address
in replies.