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

> 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.

I suppose you are right. We have no other practical option left, given the state of the software tools we are using.

However, I would still avoid a tool like rsync or tar for my backups if they occasionally skipped files and terminated nevertheless with a 
"success" exit code.

logwatch is just a glorified grep and I wouldn't want to rely solely on my eyes to realise that a file is not being backed up. As a general, 
second-level safety net, yes. But careful sysadmins should make sure their tools and their scripts always detect and report errors in a 
precise, reliable way without generating too much distracting clutter.

Also, some tools pipe stdout to others, so if you are troubleshooting, you sometimes need to start outputting warnings or trace messages to 
stderr. If that is going to start triggering unexpected failures, because some tools consider the presence of text on stderr to be an 
indication of failure, it's not going to be fun, is it?