Re: fetchmail and friends

[David Stern <kotsya@u.washington.edu>]

On Thu, 20 Nov 1997, Dima wrote:

> > David Stern wrote:
> >
> >My fetchmail, sendmail, and procmail configuration has passed initial
> >testing for use with ppp and imap (my isp recomends imap over pop3),
> >though it's not been automated or tweaked as of yet.
> >
> >I have one important issue to resolve: when I view my email in exmh (57
> >messages), I found that all my messages were concatenated into a single
> >message. 
> 
> I'd say you're using mbox (all messages in a single file) format whereas
> exmh wants mh folder format (each folder is a directory, messages are in
> individual files named 1, 2 etc).
> 
> You have to set up mh maildir (usually ~/Mail) and folder(s) in there
> (default is inbox: ~/Mail/inbox), and tell procmail to deliver there, eg.
> :0w:~/Mail/inbox/.mh_sequences.LCK
> * ^TO<filter-expr>.*
> | /usr/lib/mh/rcvstore +inbox
> 
> see procmail manpages and docs for details.

Thanks, Dimitri.  Due to your excellent help, my fetchmail works now.

There is one small issue which I've worked around, but haven't
completely resolved, because I don't understand it. When running
fetchmail -v, I get the following error output and it stalls out for
awhile, then goes to the next message, and repeats on all new messages,
doesn't matter if I'm user or root, and the messages are not fetched:

	[..]
	reading message 7 (2515 bytes)
	fetchmail: about to deliver with: /usr/bin/procmail
	#***********************.*********
	procmail: Lock failure on "~/Mail/inbox/.mh_sequences.LCK"
	[..]

The man page says "Lock failure .." is due to a permissions problem.

I editted my .procmailrc and removed all the specified lockfiles (i.e.: 
":~/Mail/<boxname>/mh_sequences.LCK"), relying on the defaults, and
everything works.  I'm happy that it works, but I'd like to know what
the problem is with permissions. I reviewed the permissions in ~/Mail/*,
but found nothing unusual.

If you didn't have the same recipe in your .procmailrc, I might be
tempted to think I'd misread the man page where it says that lockfiles
are good with MH (not mbox), but you do, so what could the error be? 

	[..]
	:0w:~/Mail/debian/.mh_sequences.LCK
	* ^TOdebian-*
	| /usr/lib/mh/rcvstore +debian
	[..]

David Stern


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