[ILUG] Fetchmail

[Andy Ferguson(ilug)]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2000 at 11:14:26PM +0100, Mark Page wrote:
> I have written on this subject before and I still don't seem to have solved the
> problem.
> 
> Fetchmail will download and flush the server of mail, but I can never locate
> thereafter. I am currently using Mandrake. Previously RedHat always created a
> /var/spool/mail/user file but under Mandrake this doesn't exist, and needs to
> be manually created. Nevertheless fetchmail does not drop the mail there!!

It may be that fetchmail is trying to deliver mail itself by calling
procmail directly rather than passing it through postfix. If
procmail fails to deliver or returns an error code for some other
reason, fetchmail silently bounces the mail as undeliverable or user unknown.

Check your fetchmailrc and direct mail delivery through
postfix/sendmail instead of procmail; it may not fix your problem
but should give you an opportunity to do soemthing about it by
fiddling with postfix/sendmail. Of course, maybe procmail isn't
installed, maybe there is another delivery agent. I think procmail
just fails silently so there is no log transaction to find; I think
it also checks the passwd file for valid users rather than expecting
a user file in /var/spool/mail.

I've got a similar problem in that mail to unknown users gets
bounced by sendmail; how can I tell sendmail not to do this or at
least notify me of bounced mail? I've even got the bat book, but
Finnegans Wake made more sense.


-- 
Andy Ferguson
~~~~~~~~~~~~~