Hi,
This afternoon I lost lots of mail messages. My ISP says this is due to
my fetchmail and/or DNS and/or sendmail configuration. They told me
some really strange stories, so I'd like to know if someone could help
me understand.
Until a week ago I was using popclient, specifying `arrakis.es' as the
server. This wasn't completly correct as I found out later; I had to
use pop.arrakis.es, which was until then just an alias.
Today they interrupted all mail service and said I had to use
pop.arrakis.es, which now is another box. So I touched my .fetchmailrc
leaving it as this:
poll pop.arrakis.es proto pop3 user ciccio pass ni-Chufa
When I called it, fetchmail started out with a message like this:
fetchmail: 70 messages at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
fetchmail: message 1 (xxx bytes) .. flushed
continuing similary up to message 25 which broke with a socket
error message. But the phone line was still up, so I just repeated
the exercise. Surprise:
fetchmail: 0 messages at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
They explained me that---because of 37,000 users--- they had
decided to use 1 RAID disk system with 2 computers which
balance load, so that each time I call, pop.arrakis.es may point to
another IP address. The confusion and data loss, according to their
explanation is due to (a) that fetchmail deletes the messages before
they have been transmitted (?!) and (b) that my DNS cache would
have chosen the wrong address.
I tried several times to fetch more mail without any problems, but
pop.arrakis always was pointing to chusuk.arrakis.es. My sendmail
is slightly hacked, but usually worked fine. If my cache only DNS
would have used the wrong address, why did it resolve
correctly in the second attempt? And finally the key question: How
is it possible that an else fine working fetchmail makes the mail
server delete unread messages? I'm using debian frozen with
linux .30. Did I miss something?
TIA
--
Ciccio C. Simon
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] .
Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .
