Michael Abbott <michael(_at_)araneidae(_dot_)co(_dot_)uk>:
On Fri, 4 Jul 2003, Paul M Foster wrote:
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.
This strikes me as completely crazy, and fits in with other problems I'm
seeing with fetchmail.
Perhaps it's a difference of philosophy, but here is how I wish fetchmail
to behave:
It should retrieve *all* messages from the POP server without
exception and find some way of passing them on. If a message is malformed
then it can always be forwarded to the postmaster as an attachment. The
only excuse for failing to forward a message can be that the local mail
recipient is not working.
Nice dream. The problem is that there are lots of malformations for
which it simply is not possible for fetchmail to figure out what the
right thing is, because the information needed to route the message
isn't there. In general, if sendmail will process it fetchmail will
-- but there is no point in trying to be smarter than the MTA, because
when you are the MTA can't use the result.
--
<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/";>Eric S. Raymond</a>