[fetchmail-users] Incorrect header line and lost mails

[Frederic M. <fre...@wo...>]

Hello,

I found 15 lines like this in my log this morning and 3 more earlier 
last week:

fetchmail[1226]: incorrect header line found while scanning headers


I read the source of fetchmail to learn more about it and I found out 
that any header containing at least one line without a colon and not 
starting with a space is considered illegal as per rfc822 and send to 
oblivion without any other consideration (at least none I could find).

Alas, it turns out that one of the three e-mails I could recover was 
definitely not a spam... I agree it was not fully rfc822 compliant but 
it was a good e-mail according to *my* standards and it could have been 
delivered since the invalid line was a very long TO header from hotmail 
(not rfc822 compliant either) wrapped by my ISP  !

I agree that the sin was in the original e-mail, but is it really the 
purpose of fetchmail to enforce rfc822 so drastically ? With such a 
name, I would expect it to fetch the e-mails and leave any 
"counter-measure" to a program designed for such a task (or at least to 
have an option to drop or accept invalid e-mails).

Now, I'm reluctant to patch and recompile the program myself. Is it 
possible to configure fetchmail to save a copy of every mail in a local 
folder before it is processed ? Could that be achieved with the --plugin 
option and how ?

I'm using fetchmail 6.2.5 as provided by the stable branch of debian.

Frederic







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