On Sat, 8 Sep 2001, L.D. Best wrote:
> Back to the downloads themselves. I know there is a lot quoted here,
> after this message. It's the recurring story of abend in POP3 download
> resulting in new download being from 1 all over again.
What's "abend?" Deutsch evening? Do you perhaps
mean "abort?" (abend is not in my dictionary)
> Now it used to be that the way things worked on Apache [and many other
> Linux] servers was this: the POP3 mail for each user was stored as a
> flatfile and the DELE commands were never executed until after QUIT
> because to do so would delete everything; after QUIT the DELE commands
> were used to "edit" the flatfile.
Apache is not a POP3 server. It is a web server.
> However, it's been a couple of years since Apache reworked the POP3
> stuff and it's now stored in a database with an index for each user and
> DELE happens at the time the command is received.
This makes no sense at all. Apache, AFAIK, has NEVER
been associated with any POP3 server. Also, there is
no database directly associated with either Apache,
or ipop3d.
True, on Linux machines, the mail files are kept
in a single file containing many e-mails. Each file
resides in /var/spool/mail/username. This is the
default way SMTP stores messages.
Apache... database... index?? Only way I can think
of that happening would be for the ISP to be serving
up webside e-mail. At that point, the ISP is no longer
using POP3, which by definition, is retrieved from
port 110 by a mail client, or manually via a
"telnet" client.
> At least that is how it is supposed to work.
Huh?
I'm not sure what assumptions you're operating under,
or what kind of off-the-wall setup your ISP might have
implemented, but in Linux and FreeBSD, the SMTP server
receives the e-mail and appends it to the end of
/var/spool/mail/username. When the user logs in on
port 110, that mail file is parsed and transferred to
the user in the manner consistent with the POP3
commands with which you're well familiar.
Alternately, the user might login to a shell account
and retrieve/read his mail from any number of online
mail readers, most commonly, PINE, mutt, elm, mail, et.al.
There are normally no databases, web servers, or
indices involved at all.
> My ISP has four servers that handle the mail. I don't know where the
> "user index" of the POP3 database is kept, but it is accessible by all
> the mail servers. <snip>
Without more detail on exactly how your ISP handles
mail, anything else would be pure speculation.
> Now that I've gotten a decent handle on telnet, I can do the
> workarounds, captures that Arachne doesn't handle, and housecleaning
> that way. But I shouldn't have to!
> So if someone would seriously consider rewriting the "tool" that creates
> the POP3 log, it might finally be possible to pinpoint what the real
> problem is and where it resides.
Switch to Linux and run fetchmail in verbose mode.
;-) <ducking>
- Steve
