Re: [fetchmail-users] fetchmail gets stuck because of malformed spam

[<Tho...@si...>]

Jakob Hirsch wrote:

> I personally would always recommend using fetchmail with the mda option
> (for the usual pop/imap retrieval), so you won't have all these smtp
> problems.
> ...
> > What is mda option?
> It means that your mail is not delivered over smtp but to the local
> delivery agent, which (usually) simply drops it in your inbox.
> 
> I use:
> 
> defaults
>   mda "/usr/sbin/sendmail -i %T"
> ...

I have a personal setup that does not (cannot) rely on a working local 
mail environment (the machine is not normally intended for handling mails).
In this case, it might rather look like this:
  mda "formail >> ${MAIL-$HOME/Post/Inbox}"
or like this:
  mda "formail -s procmail -p"

So for me, there is no smtp involved in mail retrieval.
But I've actually had similar problems a while ago; fetchmail couldn't 
get past certain spam mails. I had to use a webmail interface to 
delete them to get any further. Unfortunately, as I needed quick 
access to my other mails, I did not care to retrieve any of those 
(using the webmail interface) which I should have sent here for bug 
analysis, sorry.

So I don't know either if the malformed parts raised the same problem 
as it occurred now. But in any case, I think fetchmail error handling 
should be carefully reviewed for any possible case of aborting the 
retrieval in order to avoid this DoS situation in the future.

Kind regards,
Thomas Wolff