On Tue, Nov 04, 2003 at 03:42:40PM -0700, Monique Y. Herman wrote: > On Tue, 04 Nov 2003 at 21:54 GMT, Vincent Lefevre penned: > > On 2003-11-04 10:41:10 -0700, Monique Y. Herman wrote: > >> That's because fetchmail didn't lose the mail; the delivery system > >> did. > > > > In some sense, yes. But if fetchmail didn't use the delivery system, I > > wouldn't have lost mail. > > And if I hadn't typed 'rm -rf' in my root directory, I wouldn't have > lost my system. In both cases, the behavior is well documented, and in > both cases, user error can end in disaster. The purpose of rm is to delete files. The purpose of fetchmail is not to send my emails to /dev/null. It's not ok for a program to have dangerous defaults. Nowhere in the fetcmail manpage does it say: WARNING if your MTA is badly configured there will be MASSIVE LOSSAGE! If you don't know what an MTA is do not proceed! > >> You're absolutely right -- a misconfigured MTA is dangerous and can > >> lose your mail. What does this have to do with fetchmail? > > > > fetchmail uses a MTA, instead of doing the delivery itself (to control > > everything). If you want an example of a POP3 fetcher that does the > > delivery itself: getmail. > > fetchmail follows the "unix philosophy" of chaining well-defined > capabilities so as not to reinvent the (less capable) wheel. If you > don't like that approach, then don't use the tool, but don't claim that > the tool is poorly designed just because you don't like this philosophy > and furthermore didn't take the time to understand the basics of how the > tool worked. There is another important objective: "doing the right thing". It is simply not acceptable to lose mail. Even if it isn't fetchmail's fault, fetchmail should be fault-tolerant (deal with a misconfigured mail system). Fetchmail should scream loudly: your mail system is fubar, bailing out now! I don't know if this is possible, but I think that that would help a lot of people. Bijan -- Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com> http://www.crasseux.com
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