Continuing saga of dupilcate mails using fetchmail-6.2.5-6 in FC3

[Kevin Wang]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 17:42:30 -0800, Richard E Miles
<r.godzilla at comcast.net> wrote:
> Today while trying to get mails from my mail server I keep getting socket errors.
> This causes fetchmail to refetch mail from the server over and over again with
> the same mails. 

This typically is because of an old version of fetchmail that is
crashing while reading a malformed email message.  try upgrading to a
newer version, as well as...

> This is despite my adding expunge 10 to my .fetchmailrc file.

try 1.  that way if you do hit a 'bad message' and can't expunge it,
you won't be repeating work you've already done.  as per the man page
http://www.catb.org/~esr/fetchmail/fetchmail-man.html :

-e <count> | --expunge <count>
 	(keyword: expunge) Arrange for deletions to be made final after a
given number of messages. Under POP2 or POP3, fetchmail cannot make
deletions final without sending QUIT and ending the session -- with
this option on, fetchmail will break a long mail retrieval session
into multiple subsessions, sending QUIT after each sub-session. This
is a good defense against line drops on POP3 servers that do not do
the equivalent of a QUIT on hangup. Under IMAP, fetchmail normally
issues an EXPUNGE command after each deletion in order to force the
deletion to be done immediately. This is safest when your connection
to the server is flaky and expensive, as it avoids resending duplicate
mail after a line hit. However, on large mailboxes the overhead of
re-indexing after every message can slam the server pretty hard, so if
your connection is reliable it is good to do expunges less frequently.
Also note that some servers enforce a delay of a few seconds after
each quit, so fetchmail may not be able to get back in immediately
after an expunge -- you may see "lock busy" errors if this happens. If
you specify this option to an integer N, it tells fetchmail to only
issue expunges on every Nth delete. An argument of zero suppresses
expunges entirely (so no expunges at all will be done until the end of
run). This option does not work with ETRN or ODMR.

   - Kevin