Hide and seek with e-mail
Oct. 27th, 2003 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrisvenusHarrumph. It seems that my e-mail is occasionally disappearing off into the ether. I've only noticed this with listmail so far but it is possible that it is a wider-spread problem. So if you have sent me anything that I don't seem to have replied to drop me another mail to check I actually got it.
I first noticed things were a bit odd when I started seeing replies to e-mails that I hadn't seen yet. They were sent to mailing lists I am on so I definitely *should* have got them. A bit more investigation and they were definitely list mails and a bit more investigation and they defintiely weren't bouncing from my account according to yahoogroups.
A bit more poking revealed nothing odd. There was mail queued up on my gateway at home (where all my mail is collected from) but none of it was the missing stuff and it was all quite normally queued [1]. Unfortrunately I had already flushed my remote mail by the time I noticed so I couldn't immediately diagnose but I did later find a mail that was marked as unread remotely (which theoretically means that my local system hasn't seen it). I confirmed that it was definitely a mail that I hadn't received locally and then poked things a bit.
I ran fetchmail telling it to flush mail it had downloaded and this mail on the server (That it most certainly hadn't downloaded) got flushed. No idea why at the moment but I have suspicions it might be something to do with the fact that I've told it to only ever download at most 2 mails at a time (to ensure that mail doesn't hit spamassassin too fast). I've now disabled this but will be keeping an eye on my mail most carefully.
If anybody has had problems with fetchmail/exim/spamassasin(spamc/spamd)/procmail then do let me know. Otherwise I dare say I'll be searching the web a bit later (if I can think of a decent way to phrase the query). Anybody able to even confirm or deny my supposition that fetchmail is at fault would be appreciated. I'm just a bit confused right now. :) And a tad annoyed as well. :(
[1] spamassassin takes up huge amounts of processing time so if the load is too high mail delivery is put off until the load is happier. The machine comes to a grinding halt otherwise.
I first noticed things were a bit odd when I started seeing replies to e-mails that I hadn't seen yet. They were sent to mailing lists I am on so I definitely *should* have got them. A bit more investigation and they were definitely list mails and a bit more investigation and they defintiely weren't bouncing from my account according to yahoogroups.
A bit more poking revealed nothing odd. There was mail queued up on my gateway at home (where all my mail is collected from) but none of it was the missing stuff and it was all quite normally queued [1]. Unfortrunately I had already flushed my remote mail by the time I noticed so I couldn't immediately diagnose but I did later find a mail that was marked as unread remotely (which theoretically means that my local system hasn't seen it). I confirmed that it was definitely a mail that I hadn't received locally and then poked things a bit.
I ran fetchmail telling it to flush mail it had downloaded and this mail on the server (That it most certainly hadn't downloaded) got flushed. No idea why at the moment but I have suspicions it might be something to do with the fact that I've told it to only ever download at most 2 mails at a time (to ensure that mail doesn't hit spamassassin too fast). I've now disabled this but will be keeping an eye on my mail most carefully.
If anybody has had problems with fetchmail/exim/spamassasin(spamc/spamd)/procmail then do let me know. Otherwise I dare say I'll be searching the web a bit later (if I can think of a decent way to phrase the query). Anybody able to even confirm or deny my supposition that fetchmail is at fault would be appreciated. I'm just a bit confused right now. :) And a tad annoyed as well. :(
[1] spamassassin takes up huge amounts of processing time so if the load is too high mail delivery is put off until the load is happier. The machine comes to a grinding halt otherwise.