Re: [gentoo-user] Mutt vs Fetchmail problem

[Remco Rijnders]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 04:31:56AM -0400, Philip wrote in 
<YFr4/PITvgyTVa3U@××××××××.net>:
>210322 Remco Rijnders wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 03:22:26AM -0400, Philip wrote in
>>> I tried the Mutt 'G' command, which replied :
>>> "STLS: Mate, the command must be CAPA USER PASS QUIT ; no encryption".
>>> Of course, that wouldn't do, as it has to send out my password.
>>> So Fetchmail itself is working, but when Mutt calls it, something goes wrong.
>> How does Mutt call Fetchmail ?
>
>That I'm not sure (smile).

I think mutt doesn't call fetchmail. You have fetchmail set up to pull mail from
your pop server (this works), and you have mutt set up to also pull mail from
your pop server (this no longer works), using mutt's own built in POP support
(http://www.mutt.org/doc/manual/#pop) which does not use your fetchmail
configuration at all.

You thus have two ways set up to access your mail. You might either do away with
POP support in your mutt (as the mutt manual says: If you only need to fetch all
messages to a local mailbox you should consider using a specialized program,
such as fetchmail(1), getmail(1) or similar.), or make sure that mutt accesses
the POP server the same way that fetchmail does.

>> I think 'G' is not bound by default in Mutt.
>
>IIRC it is bound by default : at least, it's always worked before.

Ah yes, your version of mutt has POP support built in, mine doesn't and as such
'G' is not bound on my system, my bad.

>> How did you set it up in your .muttrc ?
>
>  set pop_host="pop.<ISP>"
>  set pop_pass="<password>"
>  set pop_user="<username>"
>  set pop_last
>
>Fetchmail is run as a user cron job.  It was last emerged in 2020.
>The cron jobs are running as before, but nothing is downloaded.
> .muttrc  hasn't been changed since 2020.
>
>It does appear that it is in fact more convenient to use Fetchmail directly.
>Instead of having to check several folders for new mail,
>I can issue the command (aliased as 'fm') when I decide to check mail
>& it actually tells me how many it's downloading,
>so if there's nothing, I don't have to do anything else.
>
>However, it wb helpful to find out what has gone wrong.
>It must be some pkg I updated since 210220.

Either something changed in your system, or possibly on the ISP side of things.
The "Mate, the command must be one of CAPA, USER, PASS or QUIT" error you get is
returned by the server you are trying to retrieve your mail from, not mutt, and
probably in relation to mutt sending the STLS command to (attempt to) start a
secure session. You might want to see what mutt does different from what
fetchmail does. Try adding ':995' (for port 995, used for encrypted POP3) to the
pop_host setting?

Of late, a lot of email providers (notably gmail, MS/outlook, and I think Yahoo
too) require OAUTH support to access mail. Maybe this applies to you? See the
interwebs for documentation on how to configure this for fetchmail and mutt
respectively.

I hope this helps you a little further.

Kind regards,

Remco