[fetchmail-users] After reading the FAQ, a question about lost/mangled attachments

[Peter N. S. <ps...@al...>]

Folks,

After reading the FAQ, I'm hip to fetchmail's "neutrality" on whether an 
incoming email has an attachment or not. So I'm hoping for some guidance 
on where to look for the source of a recurring problem of randomly lost 
or "damaged" pdf attachments. Typically (though not always), the pdfs 
that come through unscathed are one-page, sent one per email. The lost 
or damaged attachments tend to be larger pdf files and emails with 
multiple attachments.

I've been running fetchmail on SuSE 10.0 on my laptop, and until today 
(when I installed the latest version of fetchmail) I've been running 
6.2.X. Rather than setting up my email clients (variously, Thunderbird, 
Evolution, and Sylpheed-Claws) as POP3 to pull mail directly into the 
client, I prefer to use fetchmail and procmail to pull email in from my 
ISP and run it through spamassassin and clamav before dumping it into 
/var/spool/mail/~. From my side of the screen, the mail comes into the 
client fully processed; I don't have to wait for the email client to 
chunk away looking for spam and virus "on screen" after I've hit the Get 
New Messages button.

When I noticed the damaged attachments, I set up my clients for POP3 to 
pull the mail directly from the ISP. Then I had the senders resend the 
email. All the attachments arrived cleanly from ISP straight into email 
client. So although my ISP is Comcast (I noted the Comcast caveats on 
the FAQ page), Comcast does not seem to be the problem either. And I've 
deactivated clamav, thinking it might not like the attachments for some 
reason. But the attachments still come in damaged via the fetchmail et 
al route.

So, if Comcast isn't the problem and fetchmail doesn't give a hoot if an 
email bears an attachment or not, where else should I look?

Thanks for any help you can give...

With best regards,

Pete Spotts
-- 

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             Peter N. Spotts | Science Correspondent
                  The Christian Science Monitor
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       Office: 617-450-2449 | Office in home: 508-520-3139
         Email: ps...@al... | www.csmonitor.com
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