On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 09:52:08AM -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
> I can see at least two fetchmail bugs here: it gets the local address
> wrong, and it (gasp!) deletes the message from the POP server after a
> local SMTP failure. Yikes! It appears that all my mail from the last
> 12 hours has been irretrievably lost.
Fetchmail is an extremely broken piece of software for exactly this reason.
It can easily eat mail.
You might be better off if you can persuade it to deliver via the
/usr/{lib,sbin}/sendmail interface, as this has better error failure (it
will correctly send a bounce). I also run fetchmail out of cron, as if it
can't deliver then I get a mail (from the crondaemon) telling me that it
couldn't, at which point I can investigate. It's still, however,
irretrievably lost.
Fetchmail, quite simply, breaks the concept of reliable mail delivery.
There are some Perl packages that come with Simon Cozens' Mail::Audit that
do POP3 at the very least, and might even support IMAP these days (though
I'm not sure), which AFAIK have rather better error handling.
(
http://simon-cozens.org/writings/mail-audit.html)
MBM
--
Matthew Byng-Maddick <mbm@???> http://colondot.net/
