[TriLUG] Strange Mail Problems w/Mindspring

[Brian Weaver]

Howdy all,

I've been experiencing some strange e-mail weirdness and I'm wondering
if anyone else might have some insight into what's going on. I've had an
e-mail address on mindspring for a very long time and I'm about to get
rid of it, mainly because of the volume of SPAM. Well I finally got off
my butt and installed Spam Assassin + Vipul's Razor on my Mandrake 9.2
server at home.

I've been using fetchmail for years now to pull down my e-mail from the
mindspring account with out any problems. On my server I have Postfix
configured and fetchmail was using Postfix as the MDA. Postfix would of
course call Procmail via a .forward file, thus pre-sorting my mail
before I read it with my IMAP capable e-mail program of the day. While
setting up Spam Assassin I found out I could have fetchmail directly
invoke procmail for the MDA and bypass Postfix since it just invoked
procmail anyway. I figured I would just cut out the middle man so to
speak. 

After getting Vipul's Razor installed to work with SpamAssassin (gotta
love urpmi, yum, and the like) everything seemed OK. I was going to use
my mindspring account to "train" SA. What seems to be happening now is
that when fetchmail connects to mindspring it downloads the first
message, passes it off to procmail + SA + VR, and then tries to delete
the message on the server. During the DELE command is when the
connection aborts.

I'm thinking that it might be the fact that SA + VR can take a bit to
complete (15 to 30 sec) and that mindspring is disconnecting me. I
quickly added my account to Thunderbird at another location and was able
to successfully pull down the mail. Has anyone else had this kind of
trouble with mindspring?  Here is a trace when using fetchmail:

$ fetchmail -v -f .fetchmailrc-mindspring 2>&1  | perl -p -e '$now = localtime; print "$now: ";'
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: 6.2.4 querying mail.mindspring.com (protocol POP3) at Thu 08 Apr 2004 10:26:15 AM EDT: poll started
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK NGPopper vEL_5_7 at mindspring.com ready <27934.1081434376 at franklin.mail.mindspring.net>
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3> CAPA
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< user
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< pass
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< top
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< uidl
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< .
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3> USER XXXX
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK
Thu Apr  8 10:26:15 2004: fetchmail: POP3> PASS *
Thu Apr  8 10:26:16 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK XXXX has 2 messages (3778 octets).
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3> STAT
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK 2 3778
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3> LAST
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK 0
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: 2 messages for XXXX at mail.mindspring.com (3778 octets).
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3> LIST
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< 1 1888
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< 2 1890
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< .
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3> TOP 1 99999999
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: fetchmail: POP3< +OK
Thu Apr  8 10:26:19 2004: reading message XXXX at mail.mindspring.com:1 of 2 (1888 octets)
Thu Apr  8 10:26:50 2004: #************** flushed
Thu Apr  8 10:26:50 2004: fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
Thu Apr  8 10:26:50 2004: fetchmail: socket error while fetching from mail.mindspring.com
Thu Apr  8 10:26:50 2004: fetchmail: 6.2.4 querying mail.mindspring.com (protocol POP3) at Thu 08 Apr 2004 10:26:50 AM EDT: poll completed
Thu Apr  8 10:26:50 2004: fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)
Thu Apr  8 10:26:50 2004: fetchmail: normal termination, status 2

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