I also posted this on the Linux - Networking forum.

I am using Fetchmail and Postfix as the MDA. When fetchmail is working, it works great and postfix drops the mail in the correct inbox. The problem is that fetmail will hang up on an email and give a:

"fetchmail: socket error while fetching from mail.server.com".

No mail will be retrieved after the socket error. My .fetchmailrc file created with fetchmailconf looks like this:

set postmaster "postmaster"
set nobouncemail
set no spambounce
set properties ""
poll mail.server.com with proto POP3
user 'mailuser' there with password '******' is "mailuser" here

postfix will also give a message after the fetchmail socket error of:

"postfix/smtpd[3695]: lost connection after DATA from localhost[127.0.0.1]"

I noticed it hung on the same spam message two different times, so maybe it is a problem with the type or formating of the email.

A windows mail client has no problem retrieving the mail from the POP3 server.

I have used both SuSe 9.1 and Fedora Core 2 with the same results.

On a tip I tried " echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps" with no success.

My Linux box is behind a firewall, are there any ports I should open or forward to the Linux box to diagnose the problem?

Any help is appreciated.