[fetchmail-devel] [Bug #10841] fetchmail (all versions incl 6.3.8) hangs on certain mails.

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Bug #10841, was updated on 2007-Apr-10 04:16
Here is a current snapshot of the bug.

Project: Community Fetchmail
Category: None
Status: Open
Resolution: None
Bug Group: None
Priority: 5
Submitted by: acni
Assigned to : none
Summary: fetchmail (all versions incl 6.3.8) hangs on certain mails.

Details: 
About 2-3 times a year, fetchmail hangs while fetching certain
messages (mostly probably misformatted spam or bounces),
preventing ever fetching the rest of the mail. This happend
again today. Like always, I upgraded (to fetchmail-6.3.8)
but the problem persists.

Reproducing seems difficult because I can not artificially
create that condition on the server. But when it happens
with a certain email, fetchmail will reproducably fail whatever
you do.
Other mail clients have no difficulty (not even reading the
possibly faulty message) - neither should fetchmail.

Fetchmail should be more tolerant accepting misformatted
messages (or maybe resulting protocol deviations?)
from the server, because if one of these mails is present,
also all email after the faulty mail can never be fetched.
Another client has then to be used (even old Versions of
Netscape 4.7 etc work), to remove the offending message,
but access with this other mail client then messes up the
"Seen" flags etc, so that after that "fetchmail --all" has to
be used and redundant mail deleted. Most inconvenient,
and very annoying in daemon mode (one such message
blocks further delivery of all mails, until returning from
holidays and fixing the problem manually, as outlined above).

It is independent of the timeout used (30 seconds used below,
but even 1 hr doesn't change anything).

The problem looks like this:
 
% fetchmail
Enter password for xxx@xpop: 
8 messages for I0016733 at xpop (folder Inbox).
reading message I00...@gg...:1 of 8 (568 header octets) (51604 body octets)..................................................fetchmail: timeout after 30 seconds.
fetchmail: socket error while fetching from xxx@xpop
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)

or, with "verbose" on:

... Recipient ok
fetchmail: SMTP> DATA
fetchmail: SMTP< 354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself
#
fetchmail: IMAP< )
fetchmail: IMAP< A0007 OK FETCH completed
fetchmail: IMAP> A0008 FETCH 1 BODY.PEEK[TEXT]
fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (BODY[TEXT] {51647}
 (51647 body octets)*******************************.***************************.********************************.************************************.***********************************.****************.*****************.****************.****************.****************.**********************.********************.*****************************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.****************.*****************.*****************.****************.***********
fetchmail: timeout after 30 seconds waiting for server xpop.
fetchmail: socket error while fetching from xxx@xpop
fetchmail: 6.3.8 querying xpop (protocol IMAP) at Tue, 10 Apr 2007 10:21:22 +0200 (MET DST): poll completed
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
fetchmail: normal termination, status 2



For detailed info, follow this link:
http://developer.berlios.de/bugs/?func=detailbug&bug_id=10841&group_id=1824