Michael Abbott wrote:
I don't know what the right answer is, but the current behaviour is
not good.
The current behaviour is absolutely right. You surely don't want
fetchmail to throw away mail only because your MTA (or resolver) has a
temporary problem.
If you really want, put "antispam 451" in your fetchmailrc (untested and
strongly discouraged from).
A much better approach would be to disable domain resolving in your
sendmail configuration, with FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains').
Usually our mail provider would already block such mail (all of mine
do), so there is no pain with this.
The WORLDMAIL.COM message has been in the system for 3 days, and
understandably my sendmail is refusing to accept it (it is indeed
spam).
The worldmail.com nameservers seems to be unreachable, maybe because of
a spam wave with abusing worldmail.com as sender domain (don't know
worldmail.com).
three days to send it, and has at the same time sent the two messages
preceding it in the message list repeatedly. This is not good!
Well, that's true. If fetchmail gets a temporary error from the MTA it
should nonetheless expunge the preceding messages and try to retrieve
the following. What's your version of fetchmail?
I've resolved this problem for now by pointing MSOE at the mailbox and
reading everything, but there has to be a better solution!
That's exactly the beviour of sendmail's accept_unresolvable_domains.