Re: FW: Re: [Exim] Exim on a single-user system

Vadim Vygonets wrote:

> Quoth Matthew Byng-Maddick on Wed, Jan 02, 2002:
>
>>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.
>
> Agreed, and I've seen it happen. Mail should NEVER be lost.
> Unless it's an undeliverable bounce message, or is explicitly
> blackholed, that is. What I mean is: mail from a real human to a
> real human should NEVER be lost.
>
> I heard that getmail is a good program that does things right.


And much smaller...

>
>>This is a good reason for NOT using SMTP delivery, IMO.
>
> Or implementing it correctly, including some sort of queue. Mutt
> (which I use), when encountering a problem running sendmail,
> where you can retry, postpone or abort the message. It also
> shows you the full error message.


Agreed. In this case, I see nothing wrong with it delivering to SMTP -
but it should recognize the return codes and not flush the POP message
until it gets success. That's not a big deal. I can't see it doing any
better if it used -mda to send it to sendmail. Any program is just as
likely to ignore responses from one as the other.

I have never seen a problem with fetchmail until this morning - where it
definitely DID handle a negative response from the SMTP server, but then
tried to email postmaster@localhost (and my exim isn't set up to handle
mail to @localhost) with an entirely bogus FROM address. It's clear it
doesn't just ignore "any" error codes, but I'm willing to believe it
misses some of them and look into getmail.

derek