Greetings all, Firstly ... *executing full ceremonial k'ou t'ou* ....
Thank you ~incredibly~ to all that helped. Special thanks to Kurt, Carel, dman, Greg, Alan, and Paolo. Your combined responses of "compare your xxx to mine", "stick with it, it'll come", and especially "I was once there too ..." helped me to overcome the frustration and look at my problem from a systematic, follow-the-timeline-and-transmission route. What was it? ... well as some suggested, exim was in fact impeding the seamless flow of events. Waaaaaaay down deep in the bottom of the config file, in the section that gives delivery instructions via procmail, the 'transport' variable had been set to 'local_delivery'. When I changed this to 'procmail_pipe' .... voila, all worked ~exactly~ as desired!!!!! Apparently when using exim as an MTA, the 'mda procmail' variable in 'fetchmail'needs to have '-d <recepient>' flagged, whether is is respected or not. Changing the transport instructions in exim seems to have the effect of saying "I said to use procmail, now don't ask me again!". I then used a simpler recipe (I believe Kurt suggested it): :0: in-testing in order to test transmission, while sending mail to a non-standard (as in not usually used) mailbox. I then left it overnight - with fetchmail cron'd (in non-daemon and fetchall mode). I woke up to find an absolute slew of lovely messages from this group (and all my other mail lists) in the 'new' mailbox. If it wasn't for constant back pain, I would have done cartwheels!!!!! Then, I decided to write some recipes, giving weight to expected volume of mail from various addresses. Except for a glitch when I used '\' instead of '|' in a 'To|Cc' clause, I now have mail going exactly where I want it to go. BTW - this glitch caused over 750M (that's right) of combined messages from my mail 'server' to me informing me that messages had no recipient and were being returned (which caused a endless loop to occur). An immediate correction of the offending recipe and deletion of 3200+ messages, and now all is good to go!!!! The only way I can express this absolute 180 in temperment and sense of satisfaction is .... eating chocolate and lobster, on my birthday, whilst listening to Gregorian Chants and watching the Northern Lights. Yesterday was like taking the bar exam, when I am absolutely positive that I had been studying Psychology with a fine arts minor for the past 4 years. *shudder* Again, thank you to all. Now I am off to document my travails and successes and submit them for review and possible inclusion at some of the 'newbie' sites that Kurt recommended (to which I have all gleefully subscribed).
