Sunil Shetye wrote:
fetchmail deletes oversized mail with the flush option!
Yes, as I described in the following message, which was sent to the
fetchmail-friends list on December 12. At least I thought it was sent, but
maybe it got lost? There haven't been any comments so far, neither on the
list nor by private email.
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Some of the list members probably remember my question about how fetchmail
can be configured to delete mail exceeding a certain size without
retrieving them from the mail server. I suspected that the "limit" option
might be involved somehow, and Jakob Hirsch suggested adding the "flush"
option. Before experimenting with this, I read the manual page entries for
both options, and found the following description:
flush -F Flush all seen messages before querying
I thus believed that "flush" would not help me. But as I tried to add code
for the feature I wanted, and while discussing means to accomplish it with
Jakob, we both focused on the following lines (driver.c, V6.1.3, starting
at line 686):
else if (ctl->server.base_protocol->delete
&& !suppress_delete
&& ((msgcodes[num-1] >= 0) ? !ctl->keep : ctl->flush))
{
/* code to delete the current message */
}
If I read this correctly, the message will be deleted if the message code
signals "no errors" (>= 0) and "keep" is FALSE. This would probably be the
case for standard processing. The message will also be deleted if the
message code is MSGLEN_INVALID, MSGLEN_TOOLARGE or MSGLEN_OLD (< 0) and if
"flush" is TRUE. This means that combining "limit NNN" and "flush" will
actually delete messages exceeding the given size limit, i.e. using a
configuration similar to these lines:
poll mail.server.org proto pop3
user "johndoe" password "secret"
limit 15000 flush
As far as I can see, this is not documented. It might thus not be
considered a feature, but more of a side effect (no offense meant). Maybe
Eric can comment this? Personally, I like this behaviour and find it
useful, but I think it should be pointed out in the fetchmail docs,
especially because the removal of messages is a sensitive matter.
Comments are welcome.
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As Sunil sent a patch, I assume it is not a deliberate feature to have
oversized mail deleted, although I find it quite useful.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen / Regards
Dipl. Inform. Ralph Seichter
mailto:ralph(_at_)seichter(_dot_)de