Unfortunately, fetchmail will *never* succeed in trying to unload
this particular message, so it hangs around for ever.
Isn't fetchmail supposed to be able to run unattended without me
having to constantly monitor it and manually fetch the mails it can't
cope with?
Version of fetchmail? Contents of .fetchmailrc?
$ fetchmail -V
This is fetchmail release 6.2.5+POP2+RPA+SDPS+SSL+OPIE+INET6+NLS
Fallback MDA: (none)
FreeBSD saturn.home 4.9-RELEASE-p1 FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE-p1 #1: Wed Feb 4
11:31:42 GMT 2004 root(_at_)saturn(_dot_)home:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
i386
Taking options from command line and /home/michael/.fetchmailrc
Poll interval is 600 seconds
Logfile is /home/michael/.fetchmail.log
Idfile is /home/michael/.fetchids
Fetchmail will forward misaddressed multidrop messages to michael.
Fetchmail will direct error mail to the postmaster.
Options for retrieving from
michael(_dot_)g(_dot_)abbott(_at_)pop(_dot_)ntlworld(_dot_)com:
True name of server is pop.ntlworld.com.
Protocol is POP3.
All available authentication methods will be tried.
Server nonresponse timeout is 50 seconds.
Default mailbox selected.
All messages will be retrieved (--all on).
Fetched messages will not be kept on the server (--keep off).
Old messages will not be flushed before message retrieval (--flush off).
Rewrite of server-local addresses is enabled (--norewrite off).
Carriage-return stripping is disabled (stripcr off).
Carriage-return forcing is disabled (forcecr off).
Interpretation of Content-Transfer-Encoding is enabled (pass8bits off).
MIME decoding is disabled (mimedecode off).
Idle after poll is disabled (idle off).
Nonempty Status lines will be kept (dropstatus off)
Delivered-To lines will be kept (dropdelivered off)
Fetch message size limit is 100 (--fetchsizelimit 100).
Do binary search of UIDs during 9 out of 10 polls (--fastuidl 10).
Messages will be SMTP-forwarded to: localhost (default)
Recognized listener spam block responses are: 451
Single-drop mode: 1 local name(s) recognized.
No UIDs saved from this host.
$ cat ~/.fetchmailrc
# The line antispam 451 ensures that mail from unresolved e-mail addresses
# is discarded by fetchmail. (Without this option, fetchmail leaves the
# mail on the POP server, and repeatedly tries to send it each time it runs.)
set postmaster "michael"
set daemon 600
set no bouncemail
set no spambounce
set logfile .fetchmail.log
set properties ""
poll pop.ntlworld.com
proto POP3
timeout 50
user 'michael.g.abbott' is 'michael'
password **********
options fetchall
antispam 451
$