[plug] fetchmail keeps dying

[blockley at environ.wa.gov.au]

We could possibly help if you could give some more info.

Having said that I had problems with fetchmail yesterday.

I use: 

fetchmail -d 60

and noticed that fetchmail died in demon mode after about a minute. It
turns out that there was a bad header in a message sent to me which
made it down the line somehow but caused fetchmail to choke.  To make
matters worse there was a lock file at my pop server end which was not
deleted after fetchmail died which prevented me from restarting
fetchmail in any mode.

It wasn't until the sysadmin on the server removed the stale lock file
and I removed the mailbox that fetchmail started to work again.

I note that your fetchmail dies after 10 minutes; I suspect that that
is due to fetchmail being run with the -d 900 switch which causes
causes fetchmail to run in daemon mode and check every 15 minutes.  It
looks like it is dying every time it  tries to contact the pop (or
whatever) server. 

I did however get a couple of messages that indicated that there were
problems:

 From blockley at abpent.environ.wa.gov.au  Thu Nov 25 11:16:53 1999
 Subject: Headerless mail from blockley's mailbox on karri
Status: RO
Content-Length: 271
Lines: 19

Status: O
Content-Length: 230
Lines: 15

Status: O
Content-Length: 189
Lines: 11

Status: O
Content-Length: 149
Lines: 7

Status: O
Content-Length: 109
Lines: 3

Status: O
Content-Length: 79

  Folder: /home/blockley/Mailbox                                            662
 From FETCHMAIL-DAEMON at abpent.environ.wa.gov.au  Thu Nov 25 11:17:54 1999
 Subject: fetchmail authentication failed
Status: RO
Content-Length: 1080
Lines: 49

Status: O
Content-Length: 1038
Lines: 45

Status: O
Content-Length: 997
Lines: 41

Status: O
Content-Length: 956
Lines: 37

Status: RO
Content-Length: 914
Lines: 33

Status: O
Content-Length: 873
Lines: 29

  Folder: /home/blockley/Mailbox                                            675

Good luck

Adrian


On 25 Nov, subb3 at ibm.net wrote:
> 
> My fetchmail keeps dying every 10 minutes or so. It was working
> fine until yesterday. I can't figure out why it is dying it keeps
> dying so often. It is run in daemon mode. This is the command line
> I have been using.
> 
> fetchmail -a -s -K -d 900
> 
> Any explanation, why fetchmail keeps dying.
> 
> Subba Rao
> subb3 at ibm.net
> http://pws.prserv.net/truemax/

-- 
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Adrian Blockley (blockley at environ.wa.gov.au) |       Westralia Square,
Department of Environmental Protection       |       141 St George's Tce
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