On Thu, Jul 03, 2003 at 11:13:44AM -0700, Daniel L. Miller wrote:
Hi!
I'm using Debian Sid, with the latest Fetchmail package. Fetchmail has
been retrieving most of my mail quite sucessfully, but I'm seeing these
errors in the syslog:
incorrect header line found while scanning headers
The only way I've been able to get around this is to use another POP3
client to manually download and purge the messages - then fetchmail
doesn't complain. This error only occurs on certain messages - most of
my e-mail is working fine.
What does this mean and how can I fix it?
The problem is that there are only certain headers defined by RFC822 to
be legal in the header of an email. After the header appears a single
blank line as a delimiter between the header and the body. If illegal
lines are found it the header before the blank line, fetchmail normally
will not retrieve the email. According to the programmers, to code
fetchmail to actually retrieve such mail would be cumbersome and
error-prone. However, fetchmail can be patched to instruct the POP
server to delete such mails. There were a couple of patches posted to
the list in the last couple of months that address this. I don't know
where my copies are, but you can check the list archives.
Paul