Re: MTA problem

[Matthew Swift <swift@bu.edu>]

>>>>> "Bernd" == Bernd S Brentrup <bsb@uni-muenster.de> writes:


    Bernd> These lines containing a single dot did confuse popclient
    Bernd> as well as smail (after I saved the message at the maildrop
    Bernd> and got it using ftp).

Popclient delivers locally the mail it downloads, unless you use the
-o option, in which case it writes to a file.  What seems to happen is
that when it tries to locally deliver, the lines with the dots
terminate the mail (at least it does with sendmail).  So you get the
beginning of the message in your local maildrop, and nothing beyond
that, neither the remainder of the message nor any following messages.
Popclient somehow sees that something has failed, however, and does
not erase the mail in the POP server.  Each time you invoke popclient,
another copy of the beginning of the faulty message is put into the
maildrop.

The only way out is to use the -o option to popclient to write the
POP server mail directly to file instead of delivering it locally.
When writing to a file, the dots are no problem.

Obviously this shouldn't happen, but since it does, anyone who wants
to use popclient to deliver mail locally should be aware of it.  Using
the -o option is an OK option for my purposes.  But I'm concerned that
it may not write with -o in a safe way and potentially cause lost mail
when using -o <my local maildrop> and some other app is delivering
mail to that maildrop.  This info ought to be in the man page to
popclient; should I send a bug report?