Re: Newbie Getmail question

Charles Cazabon <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.mail.getmail.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Russ Urquhart <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> It gets about 1000 emails pulled down before I start getting:
> 
> Retrieval error: server for SimplePOP3SSLRetriever:[email protected]@pop.verizon.net:995 is broken; offered message AMT226ougKx9W+HmJgSIKAkS7K0 but failed to provide it.  Please notify the administrator of the server.  Skipping message…

This is a well-known problem caused by buggy POP/IMAP servers.  getmail has
some code to work around it.

Your real problem is your connection to the server dying:

> I get a bunch of those until I get:
> 
> getmailrc: socket error ([Errno 32] Broken pipe)
>   1000 messages (54619353 bytes) retrieved, 0 skipped

At that point the connection is dead and getmail can't tell the server to
delete/purge the retrieved emails from the server (as you want it to do, given
your config), so you end up seeing them again the next time you retrieve --
and if the connection dies again, repeat the process.

The way to work around that is to set the max_messages_per_session option, to
something less than the number of messages you can successfully retrieve - say
500 to start.  Run getmail, it will retrieve that many messages, tell the
server to purge them, and disconnect.  Then the next time you run getmail, it
will get the next 500 messages, etc, until you're caught up and there are no
messages left on the server.  If messages are still being shown because of the
bugs in the server, you can then delete those problematic ones in your webmail
view -- they should be the only messages left after the above process is
complete.

Charles
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Charles Cazabon
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