What might suddenly provoke this poplib error?

[Chris Green]

I have a short python3 program that collects E-Mails from a 'catchall'
mailbox, sends the few that might be interesting to me and dumps the
rest.

It has suddenly (after working for some years) started throwing the
following:-

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/home/chris/.mutt/bin/getCatchall.py", line 83, in <module>
        pop3.pass_('brzmilla')
      File "/usr/lib/python3.10/poplib.py", line 218, in pass_
        return self._shortcmd('PASS %s' % pswd)
      File "/usr/lib/python3.10/poplib.py", line 181, in _shortcmd
        return self._getresp()
      File "/usr/lib/python3.10/poplib.py", line 157, in _getresp
        raise error_proto(resp)
    poplib.error_proto: b'-ERR internal server error'


The section of code throwing the error is as follows:-

    #
    #
    # Connect to the POP3 server, get message count, exit if no messages   
    #
    for t in range(10):         # retry 10 times
        try:
            pop3 = poplib.POP3_SSL('mail3.gridhost.co.uk',timeout=300)
            break
        except TimeoutError: 
            if t == 9:
                log.err("Timed out 10 times, giving up")
                exit(1)
            else:
                log.warn("Timed out, try " + str(t))

    pop3.user('catchall at isbd.net')
    pop3.pass_('brzmilla')
    numMessages = len(pop3.list()[1])
    if (numMessages == 0):
        break


It seems to be saying that the POP3 server has a problem, if so there's not
much I can do about it as it's my hosting provider's mail server.  Is it
really saying the server has a problem?



-- 
Chris Green
·