Re: [Fetchmail-users] fetchmail-6.5.0 questions

[Ken M. <zar...@nt...>]

On Wed, Oct 30, 2024 at 08:35:41PM +0100, Matthias Andree via Fetchmail-users wrote:
> Am 30.10.24 um 17:06 schrieb Ken Moffat via Fetchmail-users:
> > Hi,
> 
> Hi Ken,
> 
> thanks for reaching out.
> 
> > 
> > I see that fetchmail no longer supports using an MDA as SMTP
> > fallback.
> 
> Yes. That only means there is no fallback from SMTP to MDA if the former
> fails. The plan is to always behave consistently and not try to do A
> today and in adverse situations we try B and you have to start looking
> where/how your mail ended up, because B wasn't equivalent to A (and
> fetchmail cannot prove or disprove that). I don't like such surprises.
> So I threw the fallout behavior out without removing MDA or SMTP.
> 
> Assume you use Postfix. What if you had procmail as a fallback but
> Postfix uses its own local(8) without procmail? Then procmail would
> behave differently from Postfix's local... or some messages would be
> logged by Postfix, others would not.
> 
> You configure an mda or use --mda on the command line, fetchmail uses MDA,
> you don't use mda or --mda then fetchmail uses SMTP (default) or LMTP or
> whatever else you configured.
> 
> > Sending mail to lists, and getting the incoming, for a home user has
> > become increasingly complex and I try not to change my setup. As
> > best I can understand (several years since I had to change it apart
> > from a password), I'm doing the following: (one human user on my
> > systems).
> > 
> > 1. postfix on home server, running as servername.mydomain.
> > 
> > 2. outgoing: postfix connects to my ISP's server using Cyrus-SASL.
> > 
> > 3. incoming: a cron job to run fetchmail authenticating to my ISP
> > and retrieving POP3.
> > 
> > I have always specified --enable-fallback=procmail, but I see that
> > my fetchmailrc has a comented-out invocation of procmail with a
> > comment that procmail is not needed for that if the mail server is
> > correctly setup.
> > 
> > Am I worrying unnecessarily ?
> 
> Maybe. As long as you notice in some - for you, anyways - reasonable
> timeframe that your Postfix is down, this should be good. I found that
> on reasonable distros (I have used Fedora Linux and FreeBSD in the past
> years and have been quite content) there aren't Postfix surprises for me.
> 
> ...but fetchmail should notice that it has not succeeded in retrieving
> those messages and will therefore not delete them and retry them later
> (except maybe if it uses LAST on your POP3 server, in that case you
> could specify --uidl or uidl).
> 
> > I see that procmail was originally specified so that if the mail
> > server was not responding, mail would be processed by procmail. I
> > assume (if I do not need to change anything) that if my local server
> > does not respond then the mail will just be queued ?
> 
> If your default is to talk to SMTP, it's re-fetch the same message
> later, do not delete it.
> 
> > 
> > En passant (testing configure on a desktop without kerberos):
> >   CFLAGS:   -g -O2 -I/usr/kerberos/include
> > looks a bit odd : /usr/kerberos ?
> 
> Yeah, we've had such stuff needed in various circumstances, ./configure
> adds it, either because it's one of the search paths you have for a
> ./configure --with-kerberos like option, or as a leftover workaround
> from Red Hat Linux 9 (must have been in the early 2000's) I forgot to
> remove.  At that time, some SSL implementations needed such an option to
> find krb5.h. This shouldn't be in use today, but also in
> /usr/kerberos/include there shouldn't be stuff that disturbs us. Too
> late for 6.5.0 now, should've known during the betas then I could have
> done something...
> 
> We'd need to look at your config.log and/or console output, together
> with configure.ac, to see what's there, but if fetchmail behaves
> normally and fetchmail -V doesn't emit strange things, you're probably good.
> 
> HTH
> Matthias
> 
Hi, Matthias.

Thanks for that. I'll give it a try when I've got time (with luck,
in a day or two).

I must admit I hadn't looked at past fetchmail build logs, it
turns out /usr/kerberos has been mentioned since at least
fetchmail-6.3.26.  Sorry for the noise about that.

ĸen
-- 
  I saw an eagle fly once.
  Fortunately, I had my eagle fly swatter handy.