On Mon, 30 May 2016, Rick Thomas wrote:
> Here’s the setup:
>
> I have a POP/IMAP account at pobox.com. I use cron to run fetchmail which
> retrieves (POP3) mail from pobox to a local server on my home network.
> I process the retrieved mail with procmail to split it into folders and
> subfolders based on who it’s from, addressed to, subject, etc…
>
> Here’s the .fetchmailrc file”:
> ========================= .fetchmailrc ===============================
> # Configuration created Thu Aug 15 20:08:16 2002 by fetchmailconf
> # Lightly edited later by Rick Thomas
> set postmaster "rbthomas"
> set bouncemail
> set no spambounce
> set properties ""
> # set syslog
>
> poll mail.pobox.com with proto POP3 timeout 20 and options uidl
> user 'XXXXXXX' there with password 'YYYYYY' is 'rbthomas' here options
> keep ssl
>
> mda "formail -s procmail"
> ======================================================================
>
> As I interpret your reply, I should be using a different mda — NOT
> formail. Can you give me some hint as to what it should look like?
If you are running fetchmail as a user (not daemon, not root), what about this?
mda "procmail"
What you are using right now (formail -s procmail) would be required if the
output
of fetchmail were a single mbox folder containing all the emails concatenated.
"formail -s some-command" splits a whole mbox folder made of concatenaded
messages
and feeds them to "some-command" one at a time.
I have to confess that I'm also using "formail -s procmail" in my
setup and I'm not sure why. Maybe there was a time in which fetchmail
output was a whole mbox folder and you had to split it yourself.
So I did the following test:
I created a special mbox folder in my server called "test-folder",
containing several messages, then I used this script to retrieve it:
fetchmail -a myserver --folder test-folder -m $HOME/bin/process-email
where process-email is like this:
#!/bin/sh
t=`tempfile`
cat > ${t}
What I see after running the above command line is a set of temporary
files at /tmp, corresponding to each of the messages in the "test-folder".
This means that fetchmail already feeds a message at a time to whatever
mda command you are using and you don't need to split them yourself.
The general problem that you discovered (namely, that the mbox format
is not 100% reliable regarding message boundaries) has a fix and it's
called "Maildir format". There is no way to fix that in procmail
because it is a limitation of the mbox format itself.
May I close this bug?
