Release Notes: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.7 () features -- * New --syslog option by Dave Bodenstab. * Automatic parsing of ~/.netrc for a mailserver password if necessary, thanks to Gordon Matzigkeit. * Added preconnect option for initializing ssh connections. * More FAQ material on how and when to use --interface. bugs -- * Fixed a minor bug introduced into From handling by 2.6. * Fixed bug in SMTP forwarding of msg lines with leading dot. There are 176 people on the fetchmail-friends list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.6 (Fri Dec 27 12:42:56 EST 1996) features -- * IMAP4 code now sets the server "seen" flag on each message if "keep" is on. * New FAQ material on how to use --interface. bugs -- * Dropped back to separate SockGets/SockWrite code with no attempt at stdio buffering -- we hope this will fix the Solaris peoples' problems. * Fixed length-computation bug (apparently introduced in 2.3) that messed up IMAP deletes. There are 169 people on the fetchmail-friends list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.5 (Mon Dec 23 04:18:54 EST 1996) features -- * New --interface and --monitor options for Linux courtesy of George Sipe. bugs -- * Replaced bug-prone setvbuf with setlinebuf. * Moved lock file to ~/.fetchmail to eliminate various /tmp problems. There are 165 people on the fetchmail-friends list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.4 (Sat Dec 21 05:24:44 EST 1996) features -- * Add FAQ material on troubleshooting and working around SMTP connection failures. bugs -- * Fixed a core-dump bug in MX processing that's been lurking there for ghods know how long. It could never have been more than rare. * Fixed a minor bug in Received processing. * Restored compile-time portability to Solaris. * Initial 2.4 said: "Force line-buffering on socket streams (Linux apparently defaults to this). This may fix some hang problems reported under Solaris." Unfortunately this "fix" triggers horrible lossage on long messages and had to be removed. There are 166 people on the fetchmail-friends list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ features -- * Full IMAP4 support -- we now probe for IMAP4 capabilities and use RFC822.PEEK when possible to avoid marking messages seen on the server before they are deleted. This improves recovery from sendmail and dropped-connection errors. * True stdio buffering of sockets at last, thanks to Cameron McPherson. This should be good for a significant throughput increase. * Almost all error messages that might be emitted in daemon mode now go through the error() subroutine. This is a first step towards allowing a daemon-mode fetchmail to use syslog. * SIGUSR1 is now used for wakeup rather than SIGHUP. This eliminates any possible confusion about fetchmail's behavior at logout time. * Received line parsing for envelope addresses now matches MX as well as canonical DNS addresses, making multidrop routing slightly more reliable. * Added --fetchlimit option to limit number of messages fetched in a single poll. bugs -- * Fixed a FreeBSD compilation glitch involving SIGCLD (thanks to Masafumi NAKANE). * Added some port patches for NEXTSTEP. * SIGCHLD used everywhere now, not SIGCLD (this was strictly a cosmetic bug). * Prevent occasional hangs when fetchmail was terminated by signal. There are 168 people on the fetchmail-friends list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.2 (Mon Dec 9 00:15:01 EST 1996): features -- * If SMTP returns 571 (unsolicited mail refused) to a MAIL FROM, the address is excluded by the local sendmail's spam filter. Drop the mail. (This is the only circumstance in which mail is thrown away.) * The header your mailserver uses to convey envelope addresses is no longer wired to `X-Envelope-Header'. You can now specify it with the `envelope' option in .fetchmailrc. (This header is not RFC822 standard, and we have a report of an ISP using X-Frontier-To). bugs -- * Fixed a startup-time core dump introduced by 2.1's aka-list feature. * Fixed a bug in non-implicit mode (poll specified host), also due to aka. * Various minor portability fixes for Suns. Adding #include in fetchmail.c was the most significant one. * Avoid using -lresolv when possible, some Linux versions are badly broken. * Fix error in MX record handling that was causing multidrop problems. * Disable daemon SIGCHLD handler while an MDA is running, to avoid snafus. Thanks to Dave Bodenstab for spotting this obscure bug. 156 people on the contact list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.1 (Thu Nov 28 11:07:48 EST 1996): features -- * Added FAQ file. * Try to pass envelope From to the listener so that logging and procmail processing works right. If that fails, fall back on calling-user. * Added `set logfile = ' option to rc syntax. * We now use X-Envelope-To headers and parse the Received lines. If X-Envelope-To is found, OK; otherwise we look for a `Received for' line; either is treated as a true envelope address. If neither of these are found we go to the To/Cc/Bcc header addresses. * Added `*' as a wildcard option for multidrop to ... here. This will allow names to be local names to be passed through from a multi-drop box on a mailserver * Added an `aka' option to allow users to declare mailserver aliases at start of run, so DNS does less work. During a run, cache host matches on the aka list so no potential alias has to be DNS-checked more than once. A server being polled explicitly may be referred to by any of its aliaseses. bugs -- * Nalin Dahyabhai's fix patch for MIT Kerberos support. * Fixed a fencepost error in the APOP code that was causing a core dump. * Skip flag wasn't getting reset on poll hosts following a skipped one. * Include remote name in saved UID mappings so multiple POP accounts on the same server won't get their UIDs confused. 138 people on the contact list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-2.0 (Mon Nov 18 00:32:17 EST 1996): * Fix typo in setitimer call setup that caused obscure bugs under FreeBSD. * Accept Apparently-To if there is no To header. * Include Cameron McPherson's patch for handling multi-line SMTP responses. * Don't try to feed listener the header From any more. pl 1.9.9 (Mon Nov 11 10:40:14 EST 1996): * Accept Resent-From & Apparently-From a la RFC822. * Include file fixes for Solaris 2.5 and FreeBSD 2.2. * Improved error notification on SMTP and no-matching-local-address errors. * Delivery to multidrop mailboxes now always aborts on DNS errors. * Batch limit option prevents long delivery delays on smail/qmail. * Configuration now handles -lresolv and non-Linux bind libraries correctly. pl 1.9.8 (Wed Nov 6 16:40:34 EST 1996): * Don't append spurious NUL to the headers, qmail actually notices it. * Fatal bug in multidrop code fixed. * Fail cleanly, instead of core-dumping, on mail lacking an RFC822 From line. * Don't try to keep the SMTP socket open across poll cycles. pl 1.9.7 (Fri Nov 1 10:02:34 EST 1996): * %s is back. Seems some popular MDAs actually choke on name arguments. * We can handle responses longer than the socket atomic read length now. pl 1.9.6 (Thu Oct 31 00:07:23 EST 1996): * Make rewrite option handle multiple comma-separated local names correctly. * Fix yet another fatal error in MDA argument list construction. * Reset timeout every time input is received. * Correct localname detection when --norewrite is on. pl 1.9.5 (Tue Oct 29 20:07:41 EST 1996): * Added -N, --nodetach option for debugging purposes. * Use interval timers for poll-interval sleep and nonresponse timeout. * fetchmail -q no longer parses the configuration file. * Configuration file grammar is slightly cleaned up and improved. pl 1.9.4 (Mon Oct 28 20:58:48 EST 1994): * Correct status interpretation in closemailpipe() (thanks to Neil Harkins). * Tweak SMTP forwarding to only open one listener per SMTP host in daemon mode. pl 1.9.3 (Sun Oct 27 22:35:33 EST 1996): * Handle nested parens in RFC822 comments. * More gcc -Wall cleanup. * Improved installation docs. * Don't query DNS on startup unless needed for Kerberos or multidrop mailboxes. pl 1.9.2 (Sun Oct 27 01:10:30 EST 1996): * Fix initialization-time core dump when running as root * Fix fatal error in MDA argument-list construction. 118 people on the contact list. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.9 (Fri Oct 25 23:02:26 EDT 1996): We've hit the century mark -- exactly 100 people on the fetchmail-friends list. features -- * FEATURE FREEZE IS NOW IN EFFECT! No new features until after 2.0. Thanks to everybody who contributed ideas and criticism. * It is now possible to specify multiple local recipients by giving a list of names following "to" or "is". Each local recipient is checked for in the To:, Cc: and Bcc: headers of each message; if a match is found, the message is sent to that local recipient. This makes it possible to do mailing lists and multidrop mailboxes. See the man page for details (and note the caveat in the BUGS AND KNOWN PROBLEMS section). * It is possible to specify a size limit for retrieved messages. I resisted doing this because I don't want fetchmail to be in the filtering game, but too many Europeans begged for it because their telecomms monopolies are price-gouging them on per-second phone charges. I will ignore, or be extremely rude to, anyone who takes this feature as a license to beg me for kill files or any other form of content-based filtering. Use procmail on your server if you want that. * If you use an MDA, the internal changes to support multi-drop mailboxes require that you *remove* the %s at the end of your MDA string. Local delivery addresses will be appended to the end of the command in the obvious way. * The first message from a query now includes the number of old messages when this can be determined (that is not under POP2). * POP3 UID support really works now. I make rude noises at the POP3 mavens who forced us to this with RFC1725, but thank Al Longyear for fixing and verifying my slightly buggy implementation. * Kerberos support ditto. Thanks to Chris Hanson for this feature. * When there's a daemon fetchmail in background, running fetchmail in foreground without --quit now tries to wake the daemon and force it to poll immediately. * Add option to set server nonresponse timeout. * Password is no longer displayed in verbose mode. * You may use C-like escapes to embed non-printables in passwords and other strings. Fetchmail -V will display them in a printable form. * Program now tries to set itself to the ID of the local user before running an MDA, and reset to root afterwards. This will work on any system with seteuid(2), including Linux and the BSDs. bugs -- * Default user name to deliver to is now the calling user, unless program is running as root in which case it is the remote user name (default can be overridden with an `is' or `to' declaration). In versions up to 1.7 it was the calling user; in 1.8 the remote user ID. This created some confusion. * Accept RFC822 headers with a tab after the colon. * You now see a "skipping" message for each message not retrieved. * --keep no longer overrides --flush. * Rewrite "To: jrh (J. Random Hacker)" correctly. * Find "nnn octets" anywhere on a POP3 server's RETR response line. * Fixed various bugs in --check. It now reports PS_SUCCESS only if there is new mail waiting. * Under Linux, if fetchmail is run in daemon mode with the network inaccessible, each poll leaves a socket allocated but in CLOSE state (this is visible in netstat(1)'s output). These sockets aren't garbage-collected until fetchmail exits. When whatever kernel table is involved fills up, fetchmail can no longer run even if the network is up. To avoid this, fetchmail now commits seppuku after some number of unsuccessful socket opens. * Don't try using FLAGS.SILENT, some allegedly IMAP2bis servers seem to choke on it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.8 (Fri Oct 11 15:08:10 EDT 1996): features -- * Use kill(0, pid) to make lock handling a bit smarter (thanks to Johan Vromans for the suggestion). * Arrange for timeout of client after 5 minutes if connection to server is dropped (thanks to Gaspar Sinai ). * All pretensions to RPOP support have been dropped. Yes, this is a feature, RPOP is very vulnerable to spoofing! Use APOP instead. * Normal start-of-read message now displays the byte (excuse me, "octet") size of the message. Yes, 3schwend, you can stop noodging me now :-). * Normal progress notifications now take only 1 line per message, not 2. * Linux packagers: building fetchmail now generates an RPM specfile for it. * Kerberos support via KPOP protocol (thanks to Chris Hanson). * New --check option for asking server whether there is mail without actually retrieving or deleting it. * UID support is back by popular demand. Bletch. * Permit spaces in IMAP passwords (ship them as quoted strings). bugs -- * Fix buggy getopt specification of P and p options. * Fix uninitialized-variable bug that was hanging second IMAP queries. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.7 (Tue Oct 8 11:32:44 EDT 1996): features -- * Noise words for rcfile syntax make English-like syntax possible. * Make configure more GNUish; it understands --prefix and other standard autoconf options now (see INSTALL for details) * Better documentation of the new .fetchmailrc extensions and the slightly stricter rules for ordering options. * Expanded installation instructions including how to test for correct operation without losing mail to misconfigured MDAs, alias loops, etc. bugs -- * You may have to rearrange the order of options in your .fetchmailrc. The grammar for the new multiple-user syntax requires that server options (protocol and port) come before any user options. * Fixed core dump bug that was screwing configurations with no .fetchmailrc. * Fixed broken 'p' option. * `norewrite' and `rewrite' in .fetchrc were the inverses of what they should have been (but the rewrite default was set correctly). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.6 (Sun Oct 6 20:55:09 EDT 1996): features -- * You can now have multiple entries for the same server but different users, and the right thing will happen (each user's mailbox will be queried). Even better, you can now specify multiple users in a single server entry. * Restore --mda, seems some people either can't run a port 25 listener due to bizarre dynamic-SLIP problems, or won't for security reasons. * When delivering to an MDA, print error and die (before deleting the message!) if the MDA returns nonzero status. Better safe than sorry. * If fetchmail is called through a link named `popclient' it will look in ~/.poprc for a run control file. Unless that file includes the deleted options limit and localfolder this should actually work. bug fixes -- * Makefile fixes for correct linking on Sparcs and avoiding duplication of the md5 files (leading to harmless install-time error messages). * Fix a bonehead coding error in pop3_delete() that was masked by the Intel register architecture. *blush* Thanks to Jay Anderson . * Fix bug that prevented SMTP from being specified on the defaults line. * Allow program to generate correct lockfiles when USER is undefined (i.e. under zsh). * Allow program to run with no .fetchmailrc file again. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.5 (Thu Oct 3 04:35:15 EDT 1996): * Naturally, my decision to announce 1.4 on comp.os.linux.announce immediately caused the code to manifest its first real bug -- a core dump when the "From:" header is spelled "from:" (all lower case). Fixed. * Update and expansion of NOTES. * The --all and --flush flag validity checks move to driver.c. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.4 (Wed Oct 2 09:22:37 1996): * More man page improvements. * Lexer changes to work around bison's "feature" of silently ignoring 0-value tokens (caused options nokeep, norewrite, nofetchall, noskip to be no-ops). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.3 (Tue Oct 1 05:49:49 1996): * Significant man page improvements. * Escapes for newlines in .fetchmailrc are now optional. * Kill off -2 and -3 options, redundant popclient remnants. * IMAP code simplification and robustification. Use FETCH FLAGS to find seen messages. Code should now work even if unseen messages are interspersed with seen ones, and even if messages are appended to the mailbox during the run. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.2 (Sat Sep 28 15:40:50 EDT 1996): * The great option massacre. Remove --stdout, --limit, --local, --mda. We get a significant code and complexity shrinkage this way (a lot of the configuration machinery goes away too). These things are your MDA's job. (This also kills off the lose-mail-on-disk-full bug, which I've never seen but two users reported.) * Link APOP support by default. * Fix embarrassing Makefile bug. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.1 (Sat Sep 28 09:21:10 EDT 1996): * In POP3, don't send LAST if STAT shows count of waiting messages to be zero. * Document APOP better, we know it works now. * Lose the .fetchids file and give up on POP3 UIDs, they're a dead loss. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ fetchmail-1.0 (Thu Sep 26 11:59:38 EDT 1996): * SMTP forwarding and header-rewrite features work with POP2 now. * Stricter RFC822 conformance, so SMTP to qmail works. Thanks to Cameron MacPherson for these changes. * The program is quieter but more informative now (suppress printing of server greeting message; add the server host being queried to the message count information line). * Add `skip' option to make it easier to set up test entries. * Name change (it ain't just for POP any more). ============================================================================== popclient-3.2 (Mon Sep 23 13:29:46 EDT 1996): * RPOP support (coded at a user's request but untested). * Ported to QNX (see the Makefile). * Add code by Michael Schwendt <3schwend@informatik.uni-hamburg.de> for improved sizeticker. * Improved RFC822 parsing (thanks to Rob Funk). * Move the per-user lockfile to /tmp so it gets cleared at reboot time. * Warn users that running concurrent instances of popclient is a bad idea. * Try USER and HOME to set defaults before going to the password file. This should work better in Sun NIS environments. popclient-3.1 (Thu Sep 12 15:45:25 EDT 1996): * MDA arguments are now dumped when using the -V option. * Sendmail delivery from background seems to work now. * We have IMAP2bis/IMAP4 support. * Code now autoprobes for a POP3, IMAP, or POP2 server if no protocol is specified. * SMTP forwarding support. Thanks to Harry Hochheiser for this simple but clever idea. It's now the default delivery mode. * If no UNIX From line is found, popclient will now synthesize a correct line from the RFC822 From line. * It is now possible to specify the host TCP/IP port number to connect to. popclient-3.05 (Thu Aug 22 22:59:04 EDT 1996): * Experimental support for RFC1725-compliant POP servers with the UIDL command and without LAST. popclient-3.04 (Wed Aug 21 00:22:44 EDT 1996): * Logfile option works. popclient-3.03: * Minor bug fixes for password querying and redirection to stdout. popclient-3.02 (Fri Jul 19 11:37:56 EDT 1996): * Correct buggy processing of nokeep/noflush/fetchall. * Fix buggy -mda option processing. * Added -N/--norewrite option. * Delivery via sendmail now works in non-daemon mode. popclient-3.01 (Mon Jul 1 13:33:51 EDT 1996): * Fixed a lexical analyzer bug in quoted-string processing. * Fixed a bug in dump_options that caused username to be displayed incorrectly. * The lock assertion code was in the wrong place relative to the daemonize() call. popclient-3.0 (Fri Jun 28 11:33:34 EDT 1996): Eric S. Raymond hacked extensively on 3.0b6 and took over the package with the consent of Carl Harris, the original implementor. Some of the 3.0 feature additions were inspired by Sean Oh's fetchpop 1.8 code, and a few use code directly lifted from fetchpop. Here are my (Eric's) change notes: CONFIGURATION AND BUILDING * The autoconfigure script incorrectly assumed that all Linuxes use /usr/bin/deliver. Under Linux it now checks for both /usr/bin/delivermail and /bin/mail. * I added a distribution-maker production to Makefile.in. OPTIONS AND COMMAND LINE * I have removed the -p command-line option. Given that there's a run control facility there is no excuse for encouraging users to put plaintext passwords in scripts which might be readable. * Calling popclient with no arguments now causes it to query or operate on every host in the run control file. * I have made --version more useful by having it dump the computed connection options for each server specified. * The user can now explicitly set an MDA (such as procmail) with the new option -m or -mda. Various possible MDAs are listed on the man page. POPRC FILE SYNTAX * The run control file lexer now supports "-enclosed strings which may contain whitespace. * I added a --yydebug option to enable run control parser debugging at runtime if the parser was generated with --debug. It's not documented. * You may now have a `defaults' entry in the run control file which sets overrideable values for other entries. See the man page for details. * It is now possible to set keep, flush and fetchall in your run control file. * Fixed incorrect numbering of source lines in run control file parse error messages. * The configure.in specification no longer uses the obsolete AC_TRY_COMPILE macro (it uses AC_TRY_LINK instead). MAILBOX LOCKING * I have added mandatory locking of mailbox files where supported. This will cover Linux systems, in particular. * The default behavior is now to do lock-protected append on the user's system mailbox rather than using delivermail or some other MDA. (This is a performance hack.) * The autoconfigure script now looks for standard mail locations. The default mail delivery agent is used only if it can't find a mail spool directory in the standard places. FUNCTIONAL ENHANCEMENTS * When using POP3, message headers are edited so that replies won't foo up. Anything that looks like a mail ID local to the POP host gets @ and the pop servername attached to it before being appended to the user's mailbox or passed to an MDA. * I have implemented daemon mode. * I have added a lock check to ensure that there is only one popclient running per user, and a --quit option to kill the currently running one. DOCUMENTATION * All changes and feature additions have been tested in actual use and are documented on the man page. * I have turned the comments in the sample run control file into a new manual section documenting the file format. MISCELLANEOUS BUG FIXES * I fixed some de-initialization bugs in pop2.c and pop3.c that led to fd leaks (these became painfully obvious when I tested daemon mode!). * I've fixed the flaky parser error messages. They turned out to be due to a misdeclaration of yytext. These are Carl Harris's change notes from previous releases: 3.0b5 o "From " header fix in pop2.c and pop3.c o Surpress "..." output when --stdout option specified in pop3.c 3.0b4 o alloca fix. o various diagnostic/informational message fixes. 3.0b3 o Support for retrieving only new messages from maildrop when using POP3. o Support for retrieving only the first n lines of each message when using POP3. o APOP authentication support. o Buffered socket input. 3.0b2 This is a "new features" release. o support for .poprc file. o GNU-style long options. o fixed passwords appearing in 'ps' output o support for multiple servers on one command line 3.0b1 This is mostly a test of the autoconfigure integration. Among the functions performed by the new configure script, is the ability to detect known system types, configures the mail delivery agent (MDA) correctly. This should permanently solve the problem of using something other than an MDA for mail delivery (which continues to plague Linux slackware 1.2.9). For this beta, please check the values of MDA_PATH and MDA_ARGS carefully. They should match the values found in your sendmail.cf file on the line which begins with "Mlocal". Other changes from popclient version 2.21: o no longer uses getpass() from the C library. The internal getpassword() function allows the use of long passwords. o integrated GNU getopt() for long options. Long option names will appear in a future beta. o Several compiler warnings fixed. o Fixed problems related to missing include files in Solaris port.