Re: problems with fetchmail and sent mail
>From Paul E Condon on Friday, 2004-03-12 at 14:30:29 -0700:
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 08:24:56PM +0100, Conrad Newton wrote:
> >
> > Quoting Paul E Condon <pecondon@peakpeak.com>:
> >
> > > On Fri, Mar 12, 2004 at 06:53:37PM +0100, Conrad Newton wrote:
> > > >
> > > > But since two days ago, fetchmail does
> > > > not work. A call to
> > > >
> > > > fetchmail -v
> > > >
> > > > lists the number of mails waiting, but
> > > > refuses to download any of them. It
> > > > starts on the first, gives a few dots ...
> > > > and then quits. I can download mail
> > > > from the POP3 server manually using mutt.
> > > > It also appears that my outgoing mail
> > > > is not reaching its destination.
> >
> > > I had the same problem last year. It is a problem at your isp, not
> > > with your fetchmail config. Depending on how helpful your isp is,
> > > there are several ways to fix it. The basic problem is that your isp's
> > > software has clobbered an email on his server in such a way that his
> > > software won't deliver it to you when requested by fetchmail. If you
> > > can delete that one email on his server, things will start moving
> > > again.
> > >
> > Maybe it is worth mentioning that I have three times
> > been hit in the last two weeks by the "mangled headers"
> > problem---is this the problem you are speaking of?
> >
> > The symptom there was that fetchmail stopped with an
> > error message. I could go in on the webmail interface,
> > purge the offending e-mail (usually some obvious trash
> > from yahoo), and everything worked again, as you say.
> >
> > But this time I am not getting the same error message
> > from fetchmail, and the message it blocks on (always
> > the first, never the third or the sixth, as before)
> > is in many cases from a known reliable source---it is
> > not a spam problem.
> >
> The main point of my experience is that I never had to make
> adjustments to my fetchmail to fix it. If I did make adjustments,
> then I was able to change them back once the email was cleared
> by other means.
The problem is gone. I believe it was a problem on my home network
after all. I tried sending mail within the network---to avoid the
question of the ISP---and there was the same characteristic delay in
sending, followed by non-delivery.
I decided to reboot the machine, and after the reboot everything was
fine again. No other changes were necessary.
So I can only speculate on what the actual problem was. It sounds like
maybe postfix got hung up somehow? Maybe postfix, like the ISP, has its
own "mangled headers" problem? Would fetchmail refuse to fetch if it
cannot pass the mail to postfix? I don't know, but I am really glad
that things are working again---it's almost scary how dependent I am on
having a well-functioning mail system.
Thanks for all the help,
Conrad
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