Re: [Fetchmail-users] build errors for fetchmail-6.4.8

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

Am 07.07.20 um 23:08 schrieb Peter Scott:
> Dear Matthias,
>
> Thanks for your note, with its suggestion to try adding
> "--with-ssl=/opt/openssl" to the ./configure command.
>
> It turns out that did not help, so I will abandon my attempts to
> compile fetchmail-6.4.8 on my ancient Scientific Linux 6.10 OS,
> where by necessity there is the older openssl-1.0.1e-fips
> in addition to openssl-1.1.1g.
>
> I'm in the process of migrating to Fedora 32 on a new drive
> (where everything works much more smoothly), and arranging new
> email there, with sendmail, fetchmail, procmail, bogofilter and
> mutt, all quite speedy and working well.

Peter, I appreciate you may not want to sink indefinite amounts of time
when you can migrate to a modern platform instead, but two remarks:

1. I really would like to understand if that was a system issue on your
end, or if there are lingering bugs in fetchmail's configure[.ac] script
that I could fix.
Hence, your failing configure command line and environment and
corresponding config.log would still help so I can check the particular
code path it was using in your case.

2. I actively discourage using procmail. it has been rotting unmaintined
for shy of 20 years... I'll quote the fetchmail manual page for tech
reasons:

>               The well-known procmail(1) package is very hard to
> configure properly, it has a very nasty "fall  through  to  the
>               next rule" behavior on delivery errors (even temporary
> ones, such as out of disk space if another user's mail dae‐
>               mon copies the mailbox around to purge old messages), so
> your mail will end up in  the  wrong  mailbox  sooner  or
>               later.  The proper procmail configuration is outside the
> scope of this document. Using maildrop(1) is usually much
>               easier, and many users find the filter syntax used by
> maildrop easier to understand.