Topic: Disappearing emails

[Derek]

Greetings,

I'm having a strange problem where email delivery is intermittent to one account and one account only. Some mail gets through and some doesn't - apparently randomly. This account is used by some newsroom software, (we're a radio station), to collect news scripts that are delivered hourly by a national news service. (CBC). Deleting and recreating the account makes no difference. Using a different account makes no difference. This was working for the past year without a hitch. This strange behaviour coincided with a switch for most of our users to IMAP - but the newsroom software still uses POP3 to collect the mail. The scripts are now being cc'd to a Yahoo account so that our newscasters can get all of the material - all of the mail arrives successfully in the Yahoo Inbox.

Does anyone have any insight?

(SME 5.1.2 Update 2)

Thanks,

Derek

[Jeroen]

Did you try to login to the mailbox by imap? Had that problem once and the mail showed up when I logged in with imap but not with pop3. Recreating the account did the trick for me.

Jeroen

[Derek]

Unfortunately the software that collects email from the account can only be configured with POP3.

[Derek]

Mind you...I could try disabling the newsroom software that retrieves the mail and then login to the account via IMAP. Thanks.

[Kevin Manderson]

I wonder if this is the same issue as I see regarding the multidrop deliver.

I forget the thread I talked about my findings but essentially it relates to the original mail being delivered based on (usually) a BCC. The primary mail server correctly delivers to the defined account but the address information is stripped off. POP3 then pulls the maill but there is no delivery address and it either bounces/delivers to default account or drops.

My fix is as follows:

set up a new fetchmailrc with details similar to the following snippet (obviously edited with your details).

poll mail.server with protocol POP3 user remoteaccountname is localuser@localdomain.com here password "remoteaccountpassword" fetchall;

You can also add
set daemon 600
to change the seconds between polling.

You can then start fetchmail with

fetchmail -f /your.fetchmail.rc

and it will poll and pull the mail from the defined account and deliver it to the required account. this does not use multidrop and all the mail is delivered. If you run the default sme multidrop setup the box will cry about another instance of fetchmail already running and you will get an error message from startmail - alternately turnoff the multidrop and keep editing the additional user details into your new fetchmailrc.

Regards
kevin