Fetchmail, if you don’t know and didn’t guess, is a program to retrieve email from a remote host and submit it locally via SMTP. I’ve been using it for a long time but I’ve recently discovered annoying quirks (people who have also used fetchmail for a long time will think,”Just one?”).

  • POP3 over SSL against a host running Stunnel doesn’t close the connection properly, causing “Connection reset by peer” warnings on the host. It’s obvious that the issue is known since it cropped up in 5.9.11, the problem is that the “fix” is still broken in 6.2. It’s not like TCP is misunderstood. I work around it by invoking stunnel as a plugin which, frankly, is probably the right thing to do anyway.

  • Weird delays. I haven’t checked the source but fetchmail appears to sleep a couple of seconds after connection and after any error.