fetchmail effectively disabled by incorrect header

Hi!

An invalid spam mail effectively disables fetchmail:

9 messages for blah at blah (160821 octets).
reading blah:1 of 9 (102393 octets)
fetchmail: incorrect header line found while scanning headers
fetchmail: message delimiter found while scanning headers
flushed
fetchmail: client/server protocol error while fetching from blah
fetchmail: Query status=4 (PROTOCOL)

Is fetchmail serious by quitting?? Why doesn't it just download all the
other mails? Today I found 290 mail in my inbox which were not downloaded
because mail #197 was invalid. Is fetchmail kidding me?

And why is it unable to handle that particular mail? Any other mail client
can handle it.

I run fetchmail as daemon in background and don't get any notification when
such things happen. The only notification is that I don't get any mails no
more.

fetchmail sucks.

Timo

Timo Nentwig <tcn@spamgourmet.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> An invalid spam mail effectively disables fetchmail:

> fetchmail: message delimiter found while scanning headers
> flushed

> Is fetchmail serious by quitting?? Why doesn't it just download all the
> other mails? Today I found 290 mail in my inbox which were not downloaded
> because mail #197 was invalid. Is fetchmail kidding me?

It does seem to be buggish behaivour. I suggest you report it. It may
well be that it quits because it no longer knows where the end of that
message may be.

If you have access to webmail you could delete it easily enough, or you
could use telnet to make a POP session by hand and delete it.

telnet popserver pop3
user bob
pass bobpassword
list
#Check that it's message X
head X
dele X
quit

--
Cameron Kerr
cameron.kerr@paradise.net.nz : http://nzgeeks.org/cameron/
Empowered by Perl!