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: abc@example.org
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
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.