Mailfilter POP timestamp in message-ID invalid and potentially also causes mailfilter to stall at 100% CPU.

I have a fetchmail daemon that call mailfilter as a postconnect (defined in the .fetchmailrc file). I got the following error message,
mailfilter: Examining 297 message(s).

mailfilter: Error: POP timestamp in message-ID invalid.
mailfilter: Error: Parsing the header of message 292 failed.
mailfilter: Error: Scanning of mail account failed.
mailfilter: Error: Skipping account xxxxxx@example.com@mail.example.com due to earlier errors.

and I noticed that the mailfilter process was running at 100% CPU though that may be unrelated.

I found that mailfilter 0.8.3 has a new option of -i to ignore POP timestamp. This is probably what I want to make this more stable.

As I’m adding this to a Parallels based server it is unlikely to have this version of mailfilter as this package has very little development activity as it is a stable application so I had to build from source.

My server didn’t have svn so I browsed the Sourceforge svn for mailfilter on my local PC and at the bottom there is a linkfor “Download GNU tarball” I copied that link and then pasted into my console and used wget to get this latest tarball from Sourceforge. It has a odd name so moved that to a tar.gz file name e.g. mv index.html\?view\=tar mailfilter.0.8.3.tar.gz and then ran tar xvfz mailfilter.0.8.3.tar.gz

Perquisite packages for building,

• g++
• bison
• flex
• libssl-dev

There may be more but that is the ones I needed to add to my server.

Making this you cd to the mailfilter directory and then run

./autogen.sh
make
sudo make install

If that works then this’ll probably install the mailfilter to /usr/local/bin/mailfilter so now in the .fetchmailrc change the postconnect line to have,

postconnect ''/usr/local/bin/mailfilter -i ''

use double quotes if you pass the new -i option to ignore timestamps. The -i is a new feature in Mailfilter 0.8.3 (not in 0.8.2).

Killall the mailfilter and fetchmail and then re-launch your fetchmail daemon.

Errors

Missing g++

If you see,

checking whether the C++ compiler works... no
configure: error: in `/root/sources/mailfilter':
configure: error: C++ compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.

Then check the log file and look for g++ line e.g.

configure:2879: checking for g++
configure:2909: result: no

Do a g++ and if it comes back with -bash: g++: command not found then install the g++ package and then it will work. Re-run the ./autogen.sh and then make

Missing bison

If you get the make fail and you can see /bin/sh: yacc: command not found then you need a YACC of some kind. I installed bison re-run the ./autogen.sh and then make

Missing flex

If you get an error in the make e.g. it crashes out with g++: rcfile.cc: No such file or directory

g++: no input files
make[2]: *** [rcfile.o] Error 1

then check back and see if you see error: FlexLexer.h: No such file or directory . If so then check flex is installed. Install and then re-run ./autogen.sh and then make

Missing openssl header files
If you see openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory and similar openssl/rand.h: No such file or directory then you need to install libssl-dev. Install that package and then re-run ./autogen.sh and then make.

After a month and a few weeks of use it has been stable. The erroneous timestamps are also suspected to stall Outlook 2003. I pick up emails in parallel to my customer to provide emergency support when they are on holiday. As Microsoft support for both XP and Office 2003 is finishing in April 2014 I plan to migrate the customer to a newer OS and Office version.