Email problem: fetchmail gets stuck. Please help.
 

Dear people,

trying to poll mail from my email provider using fetchmail, I see this:

<snip>
fetchmail: POP3< 94 1085588518.5739
fetchmail: POP3< 95 1085588941.18077
fetchmail: POP3< 96 1085589810.10580
fetchmail: POP3< 97 1085591018.14962
fetchmail: POP3< 98 1085593960.26115
fetchmail: POP3< 99 1085594460.6666
fetchmail: POP3< 100 1085595911.12756
fetchmail: POP3< .
100 messages for <myaccount/> at <myprovider/> (455694 octets).
fetchmail: POP3> LIST 1
fetchmail: POP3< +OK 1 5080
fetchmail: POP3> RETR 1
fetchmail: POP3< +OK 5080 octets
reading message <myaccount>@<provideremailserver>:1 of 100 (5080 octets) ..
</snip>

And that's it. It simply doesn't proceed. That's when inetd has no open ports for pop3 and imap. When I open these ports, I get one additional line of output:

<snip>
fetchmail: smtp listener protocol error
</snip>

And after a while:

<snip>
fetchmail: smtp listener protocol error
fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed
fetchmail: POP3> QUIT
fetchmail: POP3< Hello folks,
fetchmail: SMTP transaction error while fetching from pop.1und1.de
fetchmail: 6.2.5 querying pop.1und1.de (protocol POP3) at Tue 25 May 2004 11:30:24 PM CEST: poll completed
fetchmail: Query status=10 (SMTP)
</snip>


The question is: What is fetchmail waiting for?
Can anyone give a me hint, what I could check for? I really have no clue...

Thanks in advance!

gargamel

it may be that it couldn't handle something with the messages that large and it isnt happy and quits working on you. Try getting all the messages with another client, then sending a test message and see if you can get it with fetchmail.

Thanks for your reply. I haven't tried what you suggest, as Slackware is currently not my primary system, and I can't boot it right now, as I have to do run my primary (SuSE) system for a while. I'll try asap.

For now, however, I doubt that the problem has to do with the number or size of the emails. It's independent of that on Slackware, and it doesn't happen, at all on SuSE. I use fetchmail on SuSE, too, and it works just fine.

That's why I'm so confused about this error message...

Thanks again.

gargamel

After an update of the whole system the problem is gone.... whatever it was...

gargamel