Re: fetchmail failing in fetching mail from a pop server

[Robert.Land@t-online.de (Robert Wilhelm Land)]

Elizabeth, can't say how glad I am reading your response.

Yet I can't really figure out what the part of man page
you  pasted precisely means.
Does this doubling refer to double envelopes or double
message headers?

Addionaly a helpful person had sent me his configuration,
unfortunatly he's no on the list anymore.
What he uses was a system fetchmailrc with this line:
mda "/usr/sbin/exim -oMr fetchmail -oem -f  %F %T"

Further on he had set fetchmail as a trusted user in exim.conf.

Fetchmail on my system has root.root status and I was very
astonished trying this out and getting a error like
"user fetchmail unkown".

I never had heard of introducing a binary to the system using
adduser or something like that.

He explained that his configuration would override exims idea
of who the sender is and replace this with as he wrote:
"..we want fetchmail to be able to specify the sender of the
message to whatever value it derivce from the POP3 server."

Was he refering to the data in the envelopes being passed from
>pop_server ->to -> fetchmail ->to -> exim <   ?


Could you give me some assistance in understanding this?

Robert



Elizabeth Barham wrote:
> Robert.Land@t-online.de (Robert Wilhelm Land) writes:
>
> > The file below shows errors relating to unexpected message
> > lengths. Could it have something to do with the
> > missing options exim is complaining about?
> > 
> > Any help is grately appreciated
>
> Probably. From fetchmail(1):
>
>        -m , --mda 
>               (Keyword: mda) You can force mail to be  passed  to
>               an  MDA directly (rather than forwarded to port 25)
>               with the -mda or -m option.  To avoid losing  mail,
>               use  this  option  only  with MDAs like procmail or
>               sendmail that return a nonzero status on  disk-full
>               and  other  resource-exhaustion errors; the nonzero
>               status tells fetchmail  that  delivery  failed  and
>               prevents  the  message  from  being deleted off the
>               server.  If fetchmail is running as root,  it  sets
>               its  userid to that of the target user while deliv­
>               ering mail through an MDA.  Some possible MDAs  are
>               "/usr/sbin/sendmail     -oem     -f     %F     %T",
>               "/usr/bin/deliver" and  "/usr/bin/procmail  -d  %T"
>               (but  the  latter is usually redundant as it's what
>               SMTP listeners normally forward to).  Local  deliv­
>               ery addresses will be inserted into the MDA command
>               wherever you place a %T; the  mail  message's  From
>               address will be inserted where you place an %F.  Do
>               not use an MDA invocation like "sendmail  -oem  -t"
>               that  dispatches  on  the contents of To/Cc/Bcc, it
>               will create mail loops and bring the just wrath  of
>               many postmasters down upon your head.
>
> Exim doubles as sendmail, so the:
>
>        mda /usr/sbin/sendmail -oem -f %F %T
>
> will probably work.
>
> Elizabeth