On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 12:21:03PM +0200, M. Fioretti wrote:
Now that I have the password sorted out (see my previous messages) I
can download email at the new ISP. However, I see fetchmail emit a
lots of warnings like this:
#***********************.***fetchmail: message
mfioretti(_at_)mail(_dot_)mclink(_dot_)it:1 was not the expected length (2309
actual !=
2257 expected)
As far as I can tell, however, the messages in my mailbox look
fine. What is happening? Should I worry?
Their POP3 server is non RFC1939 conformant. The LIST command should report
the message size counting 2 bytes for each end of line (\r\n), but probably
it is just showing the Unix message size (end of line = \n). So my guess is
that particular message has 52 lines. If so, then you don't need to worry.
The warning is there because there's no other way in POP3 to detect message
corruption. From driver.c:
/*
* Check to see if the numbers matched?
*
* Yes, some servers foo this up horribly.
* All IMAP servers seem to get it right, and
* so does Eudora QPOP at least in 2.xx
* versions.
*
* Microsoft Exchange gets it completely
* wrong, reporting compressed rather than
* actual sizes (so the actual length of
* message is longer than the reported size).
* Another fine example of Microsoft brain death!
*
* Some older POP servers, like the old UCB
* POP server and the pre-QPOP QUALCOMM
* versions, report a longer size in the LIST
* response than actually gets shipped up.
* It's unclear what is going on here, as the
* QUALCOMM server (at least) seems to be
* reporting the on-disk size correctly.
*/
But the warning is only reported if you have debugging turned on.
Googling for this shows several people reporting the same thing, but
no solution offered (on the lists, at least).
Solution is to fix the broken POP3 server. Or just don't use fetchmail -vv
Brian.