Re: SIGPIPE thrown from an MDA or a stream socket error

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 10:49:32PM +0200, Ian Balchin wrote:
| On Fri, Jan 11, 2002 at 07:06:13PM -0500, Brenda J. Butler wrote:

| > So, you can either find out what's wrong with message 91
| > and try to prevent the MDA from dying (check your
| > exim logs, maybe exim will log something before dying),
| > or ask your isp to delete message 91 out of your mail
| > queue for you.
| 
| Both yourself and dman suggested that i look in the exim log files.
| Why did you not say to look in the fetchmail log file?

I'm not aware of a fetchmail log file, but if there is one, definitely
look to see if it has more info that what you've posted so far.

| Apart from the fact that this would seem the place to look, why did
| you not suggest that (that is, why _did_ you suggest the exim log)?
| What bit of knowledge am i missing here?

Fetchmail works like this :
    connect to pop or imap server
    identify a message, tell the server to send it through the socket
    if no MDA specified,
        connect to port 25 (SMTP) on the local machine and initiate an
        SMTP session
    otherwise
        open a pipe to the mda specified (a binary on the local
        system)
    pass the message received from the pop/imap server to the local
        mail handler

The error said the local mail handler (MDA) stopped accepting the
message before fetchmail was done handing it to it.  If you have not
specified any mda, then the MDA is exim listening on port 25.  If you
have specified an mda then the MDA is the program you specified.
Since the message said the MDA failed, I would look at the MDA's logs
to see what it was doing that made it fail.

-D

-- 

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