Re: Fetchmail lacks diplomacy skills

[Mitch Blevins <mblevin@debian.org>]

Mark Phillips wrote:
> I am trying to set up fetchmail to extract my email from university to my
> home machine.  It seems to start out okay, but falls down along the
> way.  Here's what I get:
> 
> # fetchmail
> Enter password for mark@adam.ist.flinders.edu.au: 
> fetchmail: 4 messages (3 seen) for mark at adam.ist.flinders.edu.au.
> fetchmail: skipping message 1 not flushed
> fetchmail: skipping message 2 not flushed
> fetchmail: skipping message 3 not flushed
> fetchmail: reading message 4 of 4 (2413 bytes)  (log message incomplete)
> fetchmail: timeout after 60 seconds.
> fetchmail: client/server synchronization error while fetching from
> adam.ist.flinders.edu.au
> 
> Any ideas of what is wrong?  Or how I could find out?
> 
> My .fetchmailrc is as follows:
> 
> set logfile = "/var/log/fetchmail"
> poll adam.ist.flinders.edu.au timeout 60 protocol pop3 user mark
> 
> (And by the way, /var/log/fetchmail is empty.)

It looks like your connection is timing out before you get the full
message, due to a slow server or net connection.  Also, it is not
getting the first three messages because it thinks that they are
already 'seen' from a previous connection attempt.  Try the 'fetchall'
option to fix this.

Also, I don't think the logfile entry needs the '='
The manpage uses uppercase for protocol entries.
You can also insert dummy reserved words (with, here, etc) for readability.

New .fetchmailrc

set logfile /var/log/fetchmail

poll adam.ist.flinders.edu.au with protocol POP3 timeout 250
  user mark there is mark here options fetchall


-Mitch