Re: Mails vanish after upgrading to potato

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

On Mon, Jul 19, 1999 at 02:49:50PM +0200, Tille, Andreas was heard to say:
> Hello,
> 
> after happily setting up exim/fetchmail under slink (may be you remember
> the problems I had last week) I updated to potato today.
> 
> Unfortunately I do now not get my mail on the local machine.
> After calling fetchmail I get several messages:
> 
> reading message x of y (n header octets) (m body octets) . flushed
> 
> The messages are deleted from the mail host but my mailbox remains untouched
> :-(.
> 
> I suspect that the reason is the moved spool file.
> 
> How to solve this problem?
> 
> Kind regards
> 
>         Andreas.
> 

  There are a couple of possibilities (I've had problems like this occasionally)
but I think the first order of business is to find the mail :)

  Does the directories /var/spool/exim/input contain lots of files?  Mail that
can't be delivered for some reason gets dropped here; check
/var/log/exim/mainlog for the reason.

  I suspect that the mail is *not* vanishing into the ether, because exim and
fetchmail both try to avoid that: fetchmail doesn't delete the message until it
has successfully delivered it (via an SMTP connection in this case), and exim
stores the mail in a temporary file until it's successfully delivered.  As I
said, I've had mails get 'lost' this way before; I usually can trace it to a
problem in exim's delivery rules triggered by changes in exim or fetchmail or
both (often, local delivery is failing) and recover the mail by fixing the
problem and doing a queue run.

  Daniel

-- 
  "People would panic?"
  "Very briefly, I'm afraid."

     -- The dangers of colliding with a star examined;
           Terry Pratchett, _The Light Fantasic_