Indeed. If the local SMTP server were used, fetchmail would try to use
the ESMTP SIZE extension (Postfix knows this extension) and probably
handle the condition a bit better. The "local MDA" mode is half-baked at best.
It doesn't mention that "the local MDA mode is half-baked" in the man
pages...
Seemed like a good solution to me because the point was I wanted a way
to bypass all my usual postfix restrictions. Situation is that I
normally reject mail which looks "suspicious" like having an email
address which is obviously fake. At least this way someone might get a
bounce or failure message if it's really genuine. However, by the time
fetchmail is handling mail it's going to become a bounce, so I am in the
awkward position of effectively silently discarding users' mail (because
the orig email address appears to be fake or at least it's unreplyable).
I can work around this by setting up multiple instances of the smtpd I
guess, but I was hoping to work around it in the simple way I just
described.
Also, since changing back to using the SMTP delivery option I get
occasional points where fetchmail dies with "terminated with signal
13". I'm going to set it up under daemontools if I can figure out the
correct fetchmail incantations...
Ed W