README for fetchmail

fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented POP2, POP3, APOP, and
IMAP batch mail retrieval utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP
links (such as SLIP or PPP connections).  It retrieves mail from remote
mail servers and forwards it to your local (client) machine's delivery
system, where it can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as
elm(1) or Mail(1).

The fetchmail program was originally developed (under the name popclient) by
Carl Harris <ceharris@mal.com> and now maintained by Eric S. Raymond
<esr@thyrsus.com>.  See the file NEWS for a version history.

The fetchmail code was developed under Linux and should be readily portable
to other UNIX systems (it uses GNU autoconf).  It has also been ported to
QNX; to build under QNX, see the header comments in the Makefile.

You can find the latest version of fetchmail from Eric's home page

	http://www.ccil.org/~esr

Features of fetchmail include:

	* POP2, POP3, APOP, RPOP and IMAP support with auto-probing for a
	  server on the host if no protocol is specified.

	* Easy control via command line or free-format run control file.

	* Daemon mode -- fetchmail can be run in background to poll
	  one or more hosts at a specified interval.

	* Delivery via via SMTP to the client machine's port 25 (or
	  optionally via either file-append with mandatory locking or an
	  MDA you specify). 

	* From:, To:, Cc:, and Reply-To: headers are rewritten so that 
	  usernames relative to the fetchmail host become fully-qualified
	  Internet addresses.  This enables replies to work correctly.

There is a man page at fetchmail.man.  A sample rc file is at sample.rcfile.
For a release history, see the file NEWS.
							-- esr