Re: Q re "getmail" errors

Hi!

So, ~five years later I've run into the same issue that had been
discussed here; using getmail with outlook.office365.com etc.:

On 2017-02-10T07:52:36-0600, Charles Cazabon <search-web-for-address@pyropu=
s.ca> wrote:
> Mark Bartelt <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Any obvious suggestions about what I might have done wrong?
> [...]
>> [email protected]
>> [email protected]
>>=20
>> The "Archive" one is empty, whereas the "Calendar" one is big
>> (tens of thousands of bytes).
>
> The retrieved message header you showed an example of included:
>
>   X-getmail-retrieved-from-mailbox: =3D?utf-8?q?Calendar?=3D
>
> So that definitely looks like you've configured getmail to retrieve from =
an
> IMAP folder called "Calendar" (either explicitly, or by leaving it at the
> default of "all").

It's not the default (at least nowadays); but indeed from the (nowadays)
default of just retrieving 'INBOX', I had changed to 'mailboxes =3D ALL',
<https://pyropus.ca./software/getmail/configuration.html#retriever-paramete=
rs>.
This does make getmail retrieve the desired 'Junk Email' and 'Sent Items'
folders, for example -- but also 'Calendar', and other "stuff".

As discussed back then, the latter (non-email) "messages" result in
'bad message from server!' diagnostic and "dummy '[None]' message"
delivery.  That's "OK".

However, things get "interesting" if getmail's 'delete' or 'delete_after'
options are active: that'll then actually wipe your calendar!  ..., which
is "nice" in a way ;-) but not all too useful...  (No harm done here;
tested this on an old account.)

> getmail is an *email* retrieval program.  But your Calendar folder does n=
ot
> appear to actually *contain* emails.  getmail is asking for the RFC822 me=
ssage
> body of the items in that folder, and the MS server is responding with "N=
ope,
> there isn't one", and getmail is handling that failure gracefully as it is
> designed to (by creating an essentially-empty email message as a containe=
r,
> and them embedding whatever the server /did/ return in it, so it doesn't =
just
> disappear into /dev/null).
>
> So far, it looks like everything is working as designed.  The problem is a
> misconfiguration; you need to change your getmail configuration to stop it
> trying to retrieve Things Which Are Not Email Messages.  getmail is not
> designed, and has no intention of handling, random other datatypes which =
are
> not email but which random IMAP servers store in their folders.

ACK.

However, that makes the 'mailboxes =3D ALL' option unusable.

Can we get a warning placed with 'mailboxes =3D ALL',
<https://pyropus.ca./software/getmail/configuration.html#retriever-paramete=
rs>,
to note these undesirable consequences?

I suppose that you're not interested in spending time on making
'mailboxes =3D ALL' more useful in this Microsoft setting, so I guess we're
back to manually listing 'mailboxes'.  (This is not a complaint.)


Gr=C3=BC=C3=9Fe
 Thomas