All my mail is collected on a single box via fetchmail. I've been doing so for years now and it's always been fine that way.

Some months ago some spammers started to put a single dot on a line by itself somewhere close to the end of their mails. An RFC compliant POP3 server is supposed to escape that. One mail-server that receives mails for me unfortunately isn't compliant to that and I don't have control over it.

When fetchmail encounters such a message, it will die because of a protocol error after it has delivered the mail to my local MTA but before deleting it from the POP3 server. The result is that I get duplicates of this spam mail over and over again until I manually delete the problematic mail.

I've upgraded my (originally RPM installed) fetchmail to the latest version, RTFMed and STFWed to no avail - there doesn't seem to be a way to make fetchmail recover from a problem like this.

Currently I'm half-way torn between brushing up my rusty C knowledge in order to dive into fetchmail's code and simply looking for an alternative. Conor started piston a while ago, maybe I should give it a try before anything else.

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