[tlug] Problem with FreeBSD and fetchmail]

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

From: Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>
To: tlug@example.com
Subject: Problem with FreeBSD and fetchmail
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i

As I'm the only user on my box, I usually use fetchmail => procmail =>
mutt to get my email.  I have two boxes that I use as workstations, one
running FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE and the other running Gentoo 1.4 release
candidate.  The last line is mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" which I've
always used (In FreeBSD /usr/local/bin/procmail etc)

On the FreeBSD box if I run fetchmail as a daemon, after an hour or so,
it stops working.  If I then run it in verbose mode, I get the error
message that the inbox is in use.  At this point, I have to wait for
around 45 minutes before it will start working again.

However, if I then switch over to Gentoo and poll my server it will work
immediately.  

Googling has gotten me nowhere--while I've found a couple of hits with
the same error, they were old and for other platforms.  FreeBSD is using
Fetchmail 6.1.0 while Gentoo is using 6.1.1.

Doing a diff between the output of both run in verbose mode shows the
only other difference being that FreeBSD will end with writing fetchids
file while Gentoo will end with deleting fetchids file. (In both cases
there were 0 messages at the time.)

Running procmail in verbose logging mode seems to indicate that the
problem occurs on the server, and has nothing to do with my procmail
setup--when this happens, there are no entries in the procmail log.

Looking at man fetchmail hasn't helped--I don't see what I'm missing.
The fact, however, that I find nothing on Google makes me think I'm
probably missing something horribly obvious or elementary.  I'd be
grateful if someone could point me in the right direction here, because
I'm not sure (or not knowledgeable enough about fetchmail) to know what
the next trouble shooting step would be.

TIA

-- 

Scott

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