and this is beginning to become a real pain.
Of course, have a particular problem: my ISP is NTL which runs pretty
crappy POP3 servers, but this does really seem to be something of an
"impedance matching" problem which it seems to me fetchmail is actually
fumbling pretty badly.
I won't post the details yet again, but here's the problem in a nutshell.
Most of the mail fetched from my ISP is crap, and sendmail seems
remarkably reluctant to accept it, sometimes taking several minutes before
accepting or rejecting each item of mail.
Unfortunately because fetchmail doesn't "impedance match" very well in
this case (buffering the mail would be a *very* nice idea), I either have
to time out the fetchmail connection or lose the ISP connection, or (as is
happening at the moment) both. The result is that mail is either never
delivered or delivered repeatedly.
It seems to me that there are two possible solutions.
1. Buffer all mail received from the POP server before trying to pass it
on to sendmail.
or
2. Persuade sendmail to take *all* mail without delay.
I'm happy to take either route: can anyone please advise on a reliable way
of implementing either method?