Topic: Fetchmail failure stopped outgoing mail

[Steve Hiner]

Am I correct in my understanding that fetchmail only fetches mail?  

I had a problem with fetchmail where it was choking on a message so nothing was getting fetched (see previous post).  I worked around it by using a web based client to delete the first email.  Now the email is fetched correctly but much to my surprise the server sent a flood of outgoing mail that it has been holding since last Thursday when fetchmail failed.  

Is that normal behavior?  I thought Qmail handled all of the outgoing mail separate from fetchmail.

I am running e-smith 3.0 with all of the updates, including fetchmail 5.1.4 (I think that is the right rev - it might be 5.4.1, I'm at the office so I can't check).  The server is running in dial-up multi-drop mode with SMTPSmartHost enabled for outgoing mail.

Any ideas why Qmail didn't send the outgoing mail?

Steve

[Michael Regan]

Welcome to the wonderful world of system administration.

Indeed fetchmail only fetches the mail from your ISP or email host , we have both. It presents the mail to port 25 where qmail "listens" for incoming mail.

fetchmail can "choke" if there are problems in the incoming message. While I haven't had that problem with our e-smith server - yet - I have had the problem and solved it the same way you did.

fetchmail and the outgoing function of qmail are probably run from a script. It appears that qmail is configured to send the mail after fetchmail finishes. This has the advantage of immediately sending automated responses. However, if the script fails before the mail is sent it just sits in the mail queue.

Our system, not e-smith, sends the mail before and after it runs fetchmail.

Hope this helps

[Michael Regan]

Just took another look under the hood on the e-smith server. Are you sure it is fetchmail causing the trouble and not qmail-send?

[Steve Hiner]

Thanks for the help.

I'm not really sure.  How would I know?

All I'm sure of is that fetchmail was stopping on an email.  I removed the email and only then did qmail send a bunch of outgoing mail.  I can only assume it was fetchmail since that would be quite a coincidence.

Steve