How I lost my mail with fetchmail...

cog on 2004-12-18T15:35:48

Really, lost. It must be somewhere, but I just don't know where! :-|

I simply used fetchmail to fetch it, just as I'd do from any other machine. This time, however, the mail didn't end up in /var/mail/zbr or /var/spool/mail/zbr , as usual... and I have no idea where it might be...

And the worst thing of it all is that I don't even know if there was anything important in all that mail :-(

Any ideas, anyone? It's a Slackware machine, btw.


mailq

kag on 2004-12-18T18:42:04

Check and see if sendmail had trouble with the local delivery. (Or the equivalent for whichever MTA fetchmail is feeding.)

Re:

Aristotle on 2004-12-18T20:44:31

Also check your fetchmail log (hopefully you've configured it to keep one of those…)

Re:

Aristotle on 2004-12-18T20:54:08

As well, consider replacing fetchmail+procmail(+spamassassin?) by some homegrown Mail::POP3Client+Email::Filter+Email::LocalDelivery(+Mail::SpamAssassin?) combo. The traditional combo requires one process per mail and plus a fixed overhead of several other processes per fetch, so it bogs down quite a bit when polling a heavily populated mailbox.

Besides that, locking works nicer, the syntax is non-arcane, etc etc etc. :-)