Persistent annoying fetchmail bug. Dump fetchmail? Need advice.
Hi,
A few months ago, I filed Bug #175721 against package fetchmail-ssl in
stable.
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=175721
The gist of this bug is that fetchmail does not properly handle email
with a line of text containing only an unescaped "." and nothing else.
It fetches the message OK, but fails to escape the "." before passing
the message along to a local MDA. When it passes the message to the
local MDA, the local MDA stops accepting input data upon hitting that
line, thinking that the data stream is at an end. Meanwhile, fetchmail
knows that the local MDA quit early and thus that the transfer did not
work OK; so it preserves the original message back at its source, stops
trying to fetch any more mail, and ends the connection. If fetchmail
is being run as a daemon (i.e. periodically), this happens over and over,
and the result is that you end up with a zillion broken copies of this
one message, as well as a mailbox full of unfetched mail back at the
ISP that you can't get to. The only solution is to stop fetchmail,
manually delete the offending message at the ISP somehow, then restart
fetchmail again.
This bug has been in the fetchmail-friends mailing list in the past; see
http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2002-February/001988.html
Since I filed this bug, I received no ACK of any sort from the Debian
maintainer. Indeed, no bugs filed on woody package fetchmail-ssl in the
last three months have received a response from the maintainer.
Recently, a high-traffic mailing list to which I belong has picked up a
participant who signs his email with an isolated period on a line after
his name. Thus, I went from being hit by this bug only very rarely to
being hit by it every couple of days. Since fetchmail-ssl is now
apparently being phased out as a separate package, and the fetchmail in
sarge/sid now has SSL included, I bit the bullet, dumped woody's
fetchmail-ssl, and upgraded to the version of fetchmail in sarge/sid.
Unfortunately, the bug persists there as well. The bug appears to have
been filed against that package already, and forwarded upstream; see:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=184469
In the meantime, it seems like I have to choose between dumping
the mailing list from which the offending messages come, and dumping
fetchmail until this bug gets fixed. I could also pester the person
who keeps setting this bug off; but it doesn't seem right to ask them
to change their ways to avoid trigger *my* bug problem. And at any
rate, that would lessen the frequency of the bug, but not stop it
from occurring entirely; it often happens with MIME-encoded email
where an 80-character-long line ends a sentence. The line is
terminated with an "=" and the period gets wrapped to the next line
by itself.
So, are there any other packages which provide the same functionality
as fetchmail which anyone here has used and would recommend? I've
had good experiences with fetchmail up to this point, but this is
just too annoying for words.
Thanks,
-c
--
Chris Metzler cmetzler@speakeasy.snip-me.net
(remove "snip-me." to email)
"As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I
have become civilized." - Chief Luther Standing Bear
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