After upgrade to OSX Mavericks, fetchmail fails to call procmail

Question

I just upgraded from OSX Snow Leopard to Mavericks, and now fetchmail fails to invoke procmail. Mutt is also not working, but that is a different story.

The following poll (with names changed) has worked for several years:

poll pop.1and1.com protocol: pop3 username: [email protected] password: 123123123 nokeep fetchall mda "/opt/local/bin/procmail -d %T" # pass message to the local MDA

After upgrading to Mavericks, it correctly polls the POP3 server, but fails with the following message:

fetchmail: about to deliver with: /opt/local/bin/procmail -d 'tbaker' #****fetchmail: MDA died of signal 6 not flushed

The newly installed /opt/local/bin/procmail is the super-stable v3.22 of 2001/09/10, and my default $HOME/.procmailrc and system mailbox have not changed.

I assume I'm not the only one with this problem so am surprised not to find any threads about this.

Tom

Answer 1

Solution: I found a similar post in another forum from someone who solved the problem by getting procmail from the backup of his old system and installing under Mavericks.

I retrieved fetchmail, procmail, and mutt from the Time Machine, installed them. Also installed putmail.py, which had been deleted from /usr/bin. Everything works now! Problem solved.

Lessons learned: The Mavericks upgrade hoses Unix. Unix tools compiled under Mavericks may not work correctly. Unix tools from previous versions of OSX may continue to work fine.

Answer 2

Talked to Apple a few days ago. They are aware of the problem and plan on fixing it with their next update. In the meantime I was told to take the account offline and put it back online when you want to fetch mail. This is kind of a pain in the butt but it works and hopefully they will get it fixed soon.