fetchmail-users

[fetchmail-users] getting better error messages out of fetchmail

[Ian! D. A. <id...@id...>]

My web host has some SMTP spam blocking in place; so, certain messages
that I fetch from other places are not accepted there.  I'm finding it
awkward to make fetchmail give me just the right amount of detail about
the messages that are being rejected.

Here are some captured fetchmail sessions I run at my web hosting provider
(a cPanel site):

    2 messages for someuser at somehost.com (29755 octets).
    reading message som...@so...:1 of 2 (26357 octets) fetchmail: SMTP error: 550 Administrative prohibition
    fetchmail: SMTP listener refused delivery
     flushed
    reading message som...@so...:2 of 2 (3398 octets) flushed

Another one:

    reading message oth...@ot...:1 of 1 (598 octets) fetchmail: SMTP error: 451 Temporary local problem - please try later
     not flushed

Another one:

    1 message for someuser at somehost.com (3155 octets).
    reading message som...@so...:1 of 1 (3155 octets) fetchmail: SMTP error: 550 Sender verify failed
    fetchmail: can't even send to id...@id...!
      flushed

Can fetchmail tell me just a bit more detail about the userid that was
being processed (and refused/rejected), without me having to turn on
full verbosity for all email fetching?  I'd like to see the userid that
is causing the "Administrative prohibition" and "Sender verify" errors,
without having to make all my sessions fully verbose.

Also, the output is a hard to read, with the SMTP error in the middle of
another line of output, appearing just before "flushed" or "not flushed".

-- 
| Ian! D. Allen  -  id...@id...  -  Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
| Home Page: http://www.idallen.com/ - Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/
| College professor (Open Source / Linux) via: http://teaching.idallen.com/
| Support the public commons and public digital rights:  http://eff.org/

Re: [fetchmail-users] getting better error messages out of fetchmail

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

"Ian! D. Allen" <id...@id...> writes:

> My web host has some SMTP spam blocking in place; so, certain messages
> that I fetch from other places are not accepted there.  I'm finding it
> awkward to make fetchmail give me just the right amount of detail about
> the messages that are being rejected.

I'll make a note and see if this can be addressed for 6.3.7 - but
perhaps it's 6.4 stuff.

> Also, the output is a hard to read, with the SMTP error in the middle of
> another line of output, appearing just before "flushed" or "not flushed".

Try 6.3.6-rc4, I've fixed some of this message-mixing/out of order stuff.

-- 
Matthias Andree

Re: [fetchmail-users] getting better error messages out of fetchmail

[Ian! D. A. <id...@id...>]

> > I'm finding it awkward to make fetchmail give me just the right
> > amount of detail about the messages that are being rejected.
> I'll make a note and see if this can be addressed for 6.3.7 

Below is another example of not enough detail.  I query two machines:

    fetchmail: No mail for idallen at localhost
    fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)

Obviously the first one worked, telling me what userid and what entry in
my .fetchmailrc was used.  The second query failed; but, no information
is printed about it.  It gets worse when querying more than one machine:

    fetchmail: No mail for idallen at localhost
    fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
    fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
    fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
    fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
    fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)

Which ones failed?  Which userids?  Sometimes I'm at least told the
.fetchmailrc entry of the error but not the userid being polled:

    fetchmail: timeout after 60 seconds waiting for server localhost.
    fetchmail: client/server synchronization error while fetching from localhost
    fetchmail: Query status=7 (ERROR)
    fetchmail: timeout after 60 seconds waiting for server localhost.
    fetchmail: client/server synchronization error while fetching from localhost
    fetchmail: Query status=7 (ERROR)

Please do consider an enhancement to tell us both (1) the .fetchmailrc
name and (2) the userid for connections that fail.  Editing output to
remove excess verbosity (e.g. using "sed") is easy; it's impossible to
invent output that isn't there.

Thanks for a very useful program.

-- 
| Ian! D. Allen  -  id...@id...  -  Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
| Home Page: http://www.idallen.com/ - Contact Improv: http://contactimprov.ca/
| College professor (Open Source / Linux) via: http://teaching.idallen.com/
| Support the public commons and public digital rights:  http://eff.org/

Re: [fetchmail-users] getting better error messages out of fetchmail

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

"Ian! D. Allen" <id...@id...> writes:

> Please do consider an enhancement to tell us both (1) the .fetchmailrc
> name and (2) the userid for connections that fail.  Editing output to
> remove excess verbosity (e.g. using "sed") is easy; it's impossible to
> invent output that isn't there.

Ian,

thank you for the other example. It would surely be nice to have a good
session identification (rcfile, if given; user, server, port and perhaps
folder for IMAP) logged along with the problem.

This, too, will only be fixed for 6.3.7, which will not happen too soon,
probably not this year any more.

Best regards,

-- 
Matthias Andree