On Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 03:02:28PM +0000, Matthew Byng-Maddick wrote:
> > Right. Similarly fetchmail prefers to deliver to port 25 than to
> > sendmail. I wonder if it's an assumption that the SMTP server is a
> > standalone daemon and therefore has no startup overhead? Of course, not
> > necessarily a valid assumption.
>
> Fetchmail is a pile of crap, because it often loses mail, due to this. It
> ignores any error return codes in delivering the message, but happily
> deletes it from the pop/imap server anyway.
>
> This is a good reason for NOT using SMTP delivery, IMO.
We're getting off topic, but I'd add that if you really are going to use
fetchmail:
1) Do not have it deliver mails to your local MTA. ESR is very proud of this
feature, even though I'm convinced it is very stupid:
- interesting bounces and errors if the local MTA isn't configured
properly (which on an end user system or laptop, never happens, right?)
- very slow with sendmail and other MTAs which do sometimes lengthy DNS
and RBL checks on incoming Emails (when retreiving over a modem it's
painful).
Of course the fetchmail users complain to me telling me my mail server
is dog slow.
Use something like:
mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T"
For the little story of the day, I've actually had to help ESR with his
laptop because he couldn't retreive mail with fetchmail. Turns out that
he was using dhcpcd, which changed his resolv.conf on the fly to the
correct local one when he brought his ethernet interface up. Sendmail
however had cached his old resolv.conf and was taking 30sec or more of
DNS timeouts per Email to accept each message.
2) Over imap, it defaults to expunging messages one per one, which can be
good if your connection drops often, but if a user is retreiving a
50MB/5000 message mailbox in mbox format (yes, I know about maildir and
mbx), it can be very slow.
Marc
--
Microsoft is to operating systems & security ....
.... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking
Home page:
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