Re: How getmail deals with delivery errors and with bounce e-mails

On Thu, 2020-11-05 at 08:05 +0100, R. Diez wrote:
> > I'm not sure I follow you here.  getmail printed its error to
> > stderr, which is
> > the normal way for a program to indicate a nonfatal error.  What do
> > you expect
> > getmail to do other than this?
> 
> What's your suggestion here for you users? Read syslog every day? Or
> have a script grepping for "error" in syslog? Or that not delivering 
> some of their e-mails, maybe for days, is not a critical error they
> should worry about?
> 
Careful sysadmins have the logwatch package installed and either login
as root each day to read messages sent to root or, better, have set up
aliases so mail to root gets redirected to their own login.

** mail sent to root includes the logwatch report and mail from crond.
The latter sends a message to root for every cronjob run that wrote
anything to stdout and/or stderr. If you use a cronjob to run getmail,
this is how errors and exceptions are reported to you: getmail writes
them to stderr and crond wraps them up as an email and sends that to to
the user who owns the cronjob: for system-originated cronjobs this user
is root.

Martin