Re: fetchmail, when does one loose email?
On (11/11/03 14:41), wsa wrote:
> Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 14:41:18 +0100
> From: wsa <wsa3@xs4all.nl>
> Reply-To: wsa3@xs4all.nl
> To: debian-user@lists.debian.org
> Subject: Re: fetchmail, when does one loose email?
>
> 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".
FWIW I used to use getmail which works differently from fetchmail and
seems to deliver to the mail spool file without Exim touching it. I then
used to read with mutt and delete and move mail manually.
I switched to fetchmail following the Swen attacks in order to use
mailfilter to delete the Swen mails from the pop3 server prior to
download with fetchmail. I remember that the Exim configuration took a
few attempts because of particular requirements - I had to deal with
local and non-local users with the same email domain. I retained the
keep option in fetchmail for a while until I was confident it was all
working fine.
I no longer use keep and AFAICT I haven't lost any mail.
HTH
Clive
--
http://www.clivemenzies.co.uk
strategies for business
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