[pkg-fetchmail-maint] Bug#398565: fetchmail: SMTP c. timeout for heavy loaded (slow) MTA

[Vaclav Ovsik]

Package: fetchmail
Version: 6.2.5-12sarge4
Severity: normal

I'm using fetchmail to fetch mails from our company IMAP4 (MS Exchange)
and i am using delivery through local MTA. Yesterday I have several
duplicity emails in my folder. I discover, that fetchmail simply not
flush some messages trough IMAP. In the fetchmails log was lines:

fetchmail: awakened at Tue Nov 14 09:21:57 2006
fetchmail: 1 message for zito at imap.example.com.
fetchmail: reading message zito at imap.example.com:1 of 1 (1857 header octets) fetchmai
l:  (20354 body octets) fetchmail:  not flushed
fetchmail: sleeping at Tue Nov 14 09:22:30 2006
fetchmail: awakened at Tue Nov 14 09:27:30 2006
fetchmail: 1 message for zito at imap.example.com.
fetchmail: reading message zito at imap.example.com:1 of 1 (1857 header octets) fetchmai
l:  (20354 body octets) fetchmail:  not flushed
fetchmail: sleeping at Tue Nov 14 09:28:02 2006
fetchmail: awakened at Tue Nov 14 09:33:02 2006
fetchmail: 1 message for zito at imap.example.com.
fetchmail: reading message zito at imap.example.com:1 of 1 (1857 header octets) fetchmai
l:  (20354 body octets) fetchmail:  flushed
fetchmail: sleeping at Tue Nov 14 09:33:03 2006

Interesting lines are those, witch ends `not flushed'. There is no
reason given, why these messages was not flushed, so I first suspected
IMAP server :-). I started fetchmail with `-v -v' today, bacause there
was another occurences of this problem. And there is a bit from log:

...
fetchmail: IMAP> A0006 FETCH 1 RFC822.HEADER
fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (RFC822.HEADER {3626}
fetchmail: reading message zito at imap.example.com:1 of 2 (3626 header octets)
fetchmail: SMTP< 220 bobek.pm.example.com ESMTP Exim 4.50 Tue, 14 Nov 2006 09:56:02 +01
00
fetchmail: SMTP> EHLO localhost
fetchmail: SMTP< 250-bobek.pm.example.com Hello localhost [127.0.0.1]
fetchmail: SMTP< 250-SIZE 52428800
fetchmail: SMTP< 250-PIPELINING
fetchmail: SMTP< 250 HELP
fetchmail: forwarding to localhost
fetchmail: SMTP> MAIL FROM:<hw-list-bounces at list.hw.cz> SIZE=5147
fetchmail: SMTP< 250 OK
fetchmail: SMTP> RCPT TO:<zito at localhost>
fetchmail: SMTP< 250 Accepted
fetchmail: SMTP> DATA
fetchmail: SMTP< 354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself
fetchmail: IMAP< )
fetchmail: IMAP< A0006 OK FETCH completed.
fetchmail: IMAP> A0007 FETCH 1 BODY.PEEK[TEXT]
fetchmail: IMAP< * 1 FETCH (BODY[TEXT] {1521}
fetchmail:  (1521 body octets) fetchmail: IMAP< )
fetchmail: IMAP< A0007 OK FETCH completed.
fetchmail: SMTP>. (EOM)
fetchmail: smtp listener protocol error
fetchmail:  not flushed
...

Important line `smtp listener protocol error' was catched in this case.
Because the notebook was very busy at this time, MTA (Exim4) was
probably very slow to acknoledge mail reception and fetchmail timeouts
and not flushed message. I did some big data transfers on HDD at this
time (logical volume copying). Finaly Exim devilers message, but
fetchmail tried delivery at next time again.

I couldn't find any option to increase this SMTP timeout.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.16.29xen-hg11698
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=cs_CZ.ISO-8859-2 (charmap=ISO-8859-2)

Versions of packages fetchmail depends on:
ii  adduser               3.63               Add and remove users and groups
ii  base-files            3.1.2              Debian base system miscellaneous f
ii  debconf               1.4.30.13          Debian configuration management sy
ii  debianutils           2.8.4              Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6                 2.3.2.ds1-22sarge4 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii  libssl0.9.7           0.9.7e-3sarge4     SSL shared libraries

-- no debconf information