[pkg-fetchmail-maint] Bug#383870: fetchmail: Fetchmail duplicates my SPAM every 10 minutes - ARGH!

[Helge Hafting]

Package: fetchmail
Version: 6.3.4-4
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable

I have been using fetchmail for many years - it runs every 10 minutes
fetching from a few accounts.  The mail is then fed into a local
exim, because I used to have several users on this machine.

Yesterday, I discovered a hundred-doubling of my spam folder,
which was surprising.  Spam tend to increase, but not so abruptly.

Looking at the spam, the same messages repeated over and over.
Completely identical headers, even the message id. At first   
I thought someone had made new spam software with some sort   
of fault in it, but the same messages kept coming back
after I deleted them.

Then I had a look at what fetchmail was doing:


fetchmail -c showed  893 messages waiting for me at the ISP.
Fetchmail started collecting and delivering,
then one of the messages got an error
response because of a malformed address
with spaces in it.  Example:

reading message hhafting at mail.broadpark.no:76 of 893 (1523 octets)
..fetchmail: SMTP error: 501 <Denver Pollock at mail.broadpark.no>: "@" or "."
expected after "Denver"

There were many of these in addition to normal mail/spam, and after a while
I got:

reading message hhafting at mail.broadpark.no:115 of 893 (1672 octets)
fetchmail: SMTP error: 501 Too many syntax or protocol errors
.. flushed
reading message hhafting at mail.broadpark.no:116 of 893 (1800 octets)
..fetchmail: SIGPIPE thrown from an MDA or a stream socket error
fetchmail: socket error while fetching from hhafting at mail.broadpark.no
fetchmail: Query status=2 (SOCKET)


Fetchmail gave up.  Fine, I tried a
fetchmail -c
and noticed - still 893 messages left!  But I now have many of
them in my spambox.  Every 10 minutes, fetchmail get me 115   
copies of the _same_ spam, then gives up.


Now, I understand that fetchmail don't want to destroy
the faulty messages - there could be something important.

But it _really_ should remove from the server all those
messages that were delivered successfully!  I should not get
the same (successful) spam messages delivered over and over and over!

I have never seen anything like this before, and it is very annoying.
Now, I can set up a client to access that ISP account directly, and  
delete messages on the server.  But that won't help, for surely
I will get more spam with spaces in the "TO:" field
that will trip up fetchmail again and again.

Is there a solution for this, or will there
be one soon? I'll try other versions of fetchmail
available from debian, of course.

As it is - fetchmail is unuseable because it both fail to fetch 90%
of my mail, _and_ it fills up the disk slowly threatening the system
with a full disk.  Incoming mail service is denied.


Feel free to yell if I am running fetchmail in a "stupid" way -
there isn't much thought in this setup, but it worked flawlessly
for many years now.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (900, 'testing'), (800, 'unstable'), (700, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-rc4-mm1
Locale: LANG=nb_NO.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=nb_NO.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages fetchmail depends on:
ii  adduser                       3.96       Add and remove users and groups
ii  debianutils                   2.17       Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  gettext                       0.14.6-1   GNU Internationalization utilities
ii  libc6                         2.3.6-15   GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libssl0.9.8                   0.9.8b-2   SSL shared libraries

Versions of packages fetchmail recommends:
ii  ca-certificates               20050804   Common CA Certificates PEM files

-- debconf-show failed