Re: fetchmail, when does one loose email?

[wsa <wsa3@xs4all.nl>]

Exim passes it on to icourier so everyone on the local network has their 
mail on an imap server.
It all works fine and sofar nothing has ever gone wrong, but i still 
have 'keep' as default in fetchmail to prevent people loosing their mail 
in case i screw up somewhere.
But as you say, mail boxes on the pop3 server fill up quite fast so i 
was thinking about ditching the 'keep' option.
The thing is if you google left and right there's a lot of people 
moaning about fetchmail, so i was starting to think about an alternative.
Yet when i read the FAQs and man pages it seems to me that fetchmail can 
only loose mail when the MTA it passes it's mail to is wrongly configured...

So my question is more "if the MTA fetchmail passes it's mail to is 
correctly configured can fetchmail still be the cause of loosing 
email"...in other words is it always the MTA and it's (mis)configuration 
being the 'weak link'.
And along those lines, "if the MTA fetchmail passes it's mail to is 
correctly configured is it safe to remove the keep option".

cheers


Jonathan Dowland wrote:

> When fetchmail is instructed to keep, it won't delete mail from the
> remote box, so it is safe. Although, your remote box might fill up quite
> quickly...
>
> In general, a misconfigured MTA will potentially lose you mail. If I may
> ask, why does exim pass the mail onto courier imap? To test your MTA,
> try mailing locally and watch for successfuly delivery and bounces,
> followed by a remote test, and mailing out.
>
> At the moment I've been losing mail mostly due to procmail (or, my
> misconfiguration of procmail).