Comment 5 for bug 1021699

For a home system, e.g. mine, where I have 3 or 4 accounts to check (more when the kids get older, of course), the FD limitiation is not significant at all, and of course IDLE is far nicer than polling, especially on servers which limit how often you can connect, but have no objection to IDLE use. So, personally I'd see removing IDLE as a backward step. (as far as I can see, none of the servers I connect to support NOTIFY). NOTIFY would presumably not help across multiple servers, either.

I really like fetchmail, but it struck me as annoying that the default initscript would only start the one daemon. I.e. for my use I don't see the bug as in the binary but in the initscript.

OK, a re-write of the codebase to make it capable of handling multiple concurrent connections would also solve it (sounds challenging, but I haven't looked at the source in years) and possibly use far less resources on a big system. I'm not in a position to fund such a project, sorry.

I felt my patch to the ubuntu/debian initscript a reasonable work-around until someone was.

For checking sanity of the relvant config files, how about this extra bit of shell script?

POLLING=`sed 's/#.*$//;/^\s*[Pp][Oo][Ll][Ll]\s/p;d' ${CONFIG} | wc -l `
IDLE=`sed 's/#.*$//;/^\s*[Ii][Dd][Ll][Ee]/p;d' ${CONFIG} | wc -l`
if test ${POLLING} -gt 1 -a ${IDLE} -gt 0
then
echo WARNING: ${CONFIG} uses the IDLE directive but tries to access ${POLLING} accounts. Processing will not pass the first account with an IDLE unless there is a problem with the connection.
fi