[pkg-fetchmail-maint] Bug#713018: Occasionally complains with "fetchmail: socket error while fetching from..."

[Kingsley G. Morse Jr.]

Package: fetchmail
Version: 6.3.26-1
Severity: normal


99% of the time, fetchmail seems to work A-OK for
me.

Thank you very much for maintaining it.

A cron job ran fetchmail every minute for years.

Maybe about soon after I upgraded some gnutls packages,
about 1% of the times cron ran fetchmail, cron started
sending me emails saying

    fetchmail: Connection errors for this poll:
    name 0: connection to <mailserver>:995 [1.2.3.4/995] failed: Connection refused.
    POP3 connection to <mailserver> failed: Connection refused

It happens with versions 6.3.22-2 and 6.3.26-1 of Debian's
fetchmail package.

I suspect it also happened with version 6.3.22-1.

Running fetchmail as

    fetchmail -vvv  --nodetach --nosyslog

sometimes reported

    fetchmail: running ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd (host <mailserver2> service imap)
    fetchmail: socket error while fetching from kingsley@<mailserver2>
    fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: *.<web_hosting_company_mail> != <mailserver1>

The bug stops as mysteriously as it starts.

To the best of my knowledge, no emails were lost.

About a month ago, I stopped running fetchmail as
a cron job, and started running it as a daemon
with
    
    /usr/bin/fetchmail -d 60

This seems to have solved the problem.

I hope that helps,
Kingsley

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (990, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.0.0-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages fetchmail depends on:
ii  adduser            3.113                 add and remove users and groups
ii  debianutils        4.0.2                 Miscellaneous utilities specific t
ii  libc6              2.17-1                Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii  libcomerr2         1.42~WIP-2011-07-02-1 common error description library
ii  libgssapi-krb5-2   1.10.1+dfsg-5         MIT Kerberos runtime libraries - k
ii  libkrb5-3          1.10.1+dfsg-5         MIT Kerberos runtime libraries
ii  libssl1.0.0        1.0.1e-1              SSL shared libraries
ii  lsb-base           3.2-27                Linux Standard Base 3.2 init scrip

Versions of packages fetchmail recommends:
ii  ca-certificates               20120623   Common CA certificates

Versions of packages fetchmail suggests:
ii  exim4-daemon-light [mail-tran 4.80-5.1   lightweight Exim MTA (v4) daemon
pn  fetchmailconf                 <none>     (no description available)
pn  resolvconf                    <none>     (no description available)

-- Configuration Files:
/etc/default/fetchmail changed [not included]
/etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/fetchmail [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/logcheck/ignore.d.server/fetchmail'
/etc/logcheck/ignore.d.workstation/fetchmail [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/logcheck/ignore.d.workstation/fetchmail'
/etc/ppp/ip-down.d/fetchmail [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/ppp/ip-down.d/fetchmail'
/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/fetchmail [Errno 13] Permission denied: u'/etc/ppp/ip-up.d/fetchmail'

-- debconf information excluded