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[fetchmail] how to avoid "missed" mail

2002-12-18 13:06:25
(New to using fetchmail...)

How do I avoid missing (not lost...) mail due to local delivery errors?

I've got fetchmail pulling mail from an IMAP server, using procmail as the local mda.

The keep option is turned on (and I'll periodically flush the mail on the server when the local mailboxes are known to have been written to a good backup.)

Here's the scenario. Since keep is turned on, fetchmail only pulls mail that is unread. If I simulate a local delivery error by making sure procmail can't create the mail spool

procmail: Couldn't create "/var/mail/correia"
procmail: Lock failure on "/var/mail/correia.lock"
procmail: Error while writing to "/var/mail/correia"
fetchmail: MDA returned nonzero status 18688
 not flushed

the message is left in the spool on the IMAP server. However, it has already been marked read, so (since fetchall is not turned on) fetchmail will not fetch it on the next download, and the mail is missed/overlooked.

How should I avoid this situation? Monitor my fetchmail log? Use a different configuration? Is there a particular piece of documentation that clears this up that I've overlooked?

Thanks,
Jim