I'm sorry if this is a duplicate. I posted it yesterday but it didn't
seem to come through. So I have tweaked this webmail thing and I'm
trying it again. I should add that I am down to getting only 1-5 e-mails
from my personal account before fetchmail hangs and gives a socket error
(on some spam). And then I immediately used it to download the "qrw"
mail and it fetched all 1091 messages without a problem.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
I looked through the archives for May and June and didn't see anything
that looked like my problem. If this has already been covered, my
appologies for not being more thorough in my search.
I have been using fetchmail to get my mail off of Xmission's server for
over a year with really no problems. But about a month and a half ago
(middle of May) I started getting these socket errors:
sedwards(_at_)bell$ fetchmail -a -p POP3 mail.xmission.com
Enter password for sedwards(_at_)mail(_dot_)xmission(_dot_)com:
661 messages for sedwards at mail.xmission.com (4244544 octets).
reading message sedwards(_at_)mail(_dot_)xmission(_dot_)com:1 of 661 (3649
octets) ...
flushed
reading message sedwards(_at_)mail(_dot_)xmission(_dot_)com:2 of 661 (3597
octets) ...
flushed
fetchmail: SIGPIPE thrown from an MDA or a stream socket error
fetchmail: socket error while fetching from mail.xmission.com
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
At first it wasn't that often and it seems like I would be able to restart
fetchmail and continue on. Then it got worse and even worse than that it
got to the point where fetch mail would never remove that message (it
would fetch it ok, but not delete it). Everytime it stopped I would have
to login to Xmission and get into Pine and delete that message and then
re-start fetchmail and it would continue on.
The odd thing however was that I have two accounts on Xmission and I use
fetchmail to fetch them both. It only did it on one of the accounts. This
(qrw) account which has a much higher volume of mail (700-1000 a day)
worked just fine. But my personal account which has a lower volume (~100
per day) had this problem with socket errors. One thing I was suspicious
of was that it always failed on a spam message. Another difference
between my two accounts is that this account doesn't get quite as much
spam, whereas my personal account I would say that 90-95% of it is spam.
I phoned Xmission but the guy I talked to knew about Outlook and had no
idea what fetchmail even was.
At that time I was running OpenBSD 3.2 and I don't know what version of
fetchmail. Since I was planning to upgrade to 3.3 I decided to not worry
about it and see if the newer version solved the problem.
In the mean time the problem got progressively worse. And finally a
couple of weeks ago it started failing with the "qrw" account. It didn't
fail as often as with my personal account, but it did fail a couple of
times with non-spam e-mail.
So I finally upgraded the machine to OpenBSD 3.3:
This is fetchmail release 6.2.0+NTLM+SSL+INET6
Fallback MDA: (none)
OpenBSD bell.attbi.com 3.3 GENERIC#44 i386
Taking options from command line
No mailservers set up -- perhaps /home/sedwards/.fetchmailrc is missing?
But it is still doing the same thing, if not worse. It's to the point
where it is horrible trying to get my mail. Yesterday, I went through a
cycle (fetch, login, delete) every chance I got (more than a dozen times)
and all I got were 250 messages out of 900.
But here is the kicker: almost all of the e-mail that it is hanging up on
is spam from the same outfit (DotComDiscounters). They always have an
address in Boca Raton Florida that you can write to. They have a web
address that they say you unsubscribe, but they are lying because the
address doesn't even resolve (bobalou1.com). I'm really pissed off at
those sob's for screwing up my e-mail this way and not having any way to
stop that garbage.
Is there any known problems with fetchmail that would cause this problem?
Or is this a feature ;-) Could the problem be on Xmission's end (it did
seem to appear when no changes that I know of happened on my end)?
Thanks
-Scott