Philip Webb <purs...@ca.inter.net> writes: > 090106 Willie Wong wrote: >> you may want to change the root line to "root=purslow", >> so the mail gets sent to purslow instead of postmaster >> (which according to /etc/mail/aliases becomes root again). > > That doesn't work, but adding '> /dev/null' or '-s' in crontab does. > The latter seems simpler, so that's what I've done. > > It doesn't explain why the problem suddenly arose last Sunday > after I made a simple editing change in .fetchmailrc > & nothing like this had happened before > with the same crontab & ssmtp.conf : perhaps there's an obscure bug, > but the irritating problem has been resolved & I have other jobs today. > > Thanks for the helpful advice (smile).
Looking back thru the thread I don't see the actual change made to fetchmailrc. Maybe just blind. >From my experience fetchmail is a very robust (non buggy) and easily configured tool. At least for my simple usage. It's the only config I can think of that is edited much like you might talk to friend while walking along. Something that happens from time to time is introducing an unprintable CHAR into a *.rc file and not being able to see it. I'm not sure if fetchmail would respond poorly to that. If there is any chance of that; you might want to use vim to check each line. You can hit the el (l) lowercase, on each line to expose most kinds of unprintable char. It takes 3 key strokes to show the line. 1) : 2) l 3) enter Then the line appears in the command area along with any unprintable chars, As Willie mentioned the mail mta is capable of rewriting stuff in its configurations. Do you control this machine? Sorry if you've already covered that. Another unlikely thing that can catch you ... happened to me on a remote account I didn't control. The machine underwent some kind of mishap that required serious backup effort replacing all us users files from backups. Turned out the backups were pretty old and further I missed the notification about the mishap... the next thing I knew lots of strange things began to happen. Some of my older configurations were re-introduced in place of things I had changed due to new circumstances.
