Kudos to fetchmail

Originally posted 2004-06-25 11:57:35

My e-mail was broken. Irretrievably broken. I knew I had messages out there, out in the ether, but I couldn’t pull them down–not using Thunderbird under Windows XP, nor the Mail app on Mac OS X. Both applications reported no messages on the server, hoping to put me off with pretense. Frustrating.

Then I remembered the Linux box that sits in my closet, the one that I sometimes SSH into from the outside world so I can read my e-mail from any Internet-connected machine. I run fetchmail on it to retrieve my mail, and mutt to read my mail. With some amount of resignation, and even less hope, I SSH’ed in and ran fetchmail. Like obedient ducklings behind a matronly mallard, my messages waddled through the wires to my Linux box, where mutt scooped them up and offered them for my perusal. No lies. No sham. No pretense. It saw the messages and pulled them down.

What was wrong with my mailbox on the POP server? How was it flummoxing my e-mail clients? I suppose if I were hungrier or more inquisitive, I would have copied the mailbox from the POP server to a local drive, downloaded the source to Thunderbird, built it, put it in debug, and stepped through the pull process to find the offense that bludgeoned both Thunderbird and Mail.app into silent perfidy. Maybe next time–I just wanted my e-mail.

Maybe Outlook or Outlook Express could have sailed through whatever trap lay in my mailbox, but I can’t handle their attendant exposure. Perhaps Eudora, Pegasus Mail, or The Bat! could have triumphed, but I don’t have them installed, so fetchmail got the first crack at the problem.

In The Art of UNIX Programming, Eric Raymond repreatedly proffers fetchmail as an archetype of flexibility and a paragon of software engineering, shoehorning it into seemingly every discussion he could wedge it into. \”Enough of the chest-beating!\” I thought, despite his protestations to the contrary. Well, Eric, beat away: the stuff is good.

By the way, I got about 30 e-mail messages. Too bad they were all spam.