[ale] Messages hanging fetchmail

[Joe Knapka]

Hi folks,

Long time no post... How's things?

Anyway. I'm running fetchmail 6.2.5 to get mail from several POP
maildrops. Occasionally a message will turn up that fetchmail cannot
retrieve. When this happens, fetchmail tries to retrieve the message,
but eventually times out with:

fetchmail: socket error while fetching from pop.earthlink.net
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)

It then abandons the exchange without deleting any of the messages it
successfully retrieved, which is a bugger because the next time it
connects to the server it gets the same five or ten or a hundred
messages AGAIN, and my local mailbox then fills up with many, many
copies of the messages prior to the one that causes the problem.  The
only solution I've got so far is to manually log in to the POP server
and delete the offending message; as soon as the "problem" message is
deleted, fetchmail can get the rest of the messages. This symptom does
not match any of the "hang" symptoms described in the fetchmail FAQ.

Interestingly, I have also had this problem on occasion when using
Netscape or Mozilla Messenger to retrieve mail. That would seem to
suggest that the problem lies on the server end, but I'm
pretty sure (not 100% certain) that I've seen the problem with
multiple mail servers.

Anyone seen this issue?

Thanks,

-- Joe
Joseph Knapka   j k n a p k a at k n e u r o . n e t