[TriLUG] Strange Mail Problems w/Mindspring

[Michael Hrivnak]

I once had a very odd problem with my mindspring account.  I also use Mandrake 
9.2 with SA, razor, fetchmail, and I still go through postfix.  What happened 
is I was getting the same spam message every few minutes, and this went on 
for more than a day.  Eventually I discovered that fetchmail was getting 
errors trying to delete the message presumably due to a disk error on the 
other end, and so it would retrieve that email every time it checked for 
email and never delete it.  I ended up just having to connect through a 
webmail interface and delete it myself.

Good luck,
Michael

On Thursday 08 April 2004 10:31 am, Brian Weaver wrote:
> 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