On Sat, 12 Jun 1999 03:45:53 +0200 "Mark Weinem" wrote:
> D. J. Bernstein:
>
> > This sort of idiocy happens much more often than most subscribers know,
> > thanks to a broken piece of software by Eric Raymond called fetchmail.
>
> Is there a good fetchmail alternative?
Fetchmail to pick up mail from a POP3 or IMAP mailbox and deliver it
locally is reasonable. Not a great program, but it mostly works.
When fetchmail is used to turn a single POP3 or IMAP maildrop into a
mail spool for a whole domain there are problems. To do this
fetchmail wants to:
(i) download the mail (fair enough)
(ii) figure out the envelope sender and recipient addresses (Danger!)
(iii) re-inject the mail into a local mail spool (hmm)
Much goes wrong at point (ii), since sendmail sometimes trashes
envelope recipient information. There are also opportunities to mess
up at (iii), either by misconfiguration or when the MTA the mail is
injected into is really lame.
Good alternatives for spooling mail for a domain for later retrieval
include serialmail, on-demand SMTP and even UUCP.
Regards,
Giles
