The fetchmail Home Page

Note: if you are a stranded fetchmail.com user, we're sorry but we have nothing to do with that site and cannot help you. It's just an unfortunate coincidence of names.

What fetchmail does:

Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of IMAP, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even support IPv6 and IPSEC.

Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as mutt, elm(1) or BSD Mail. It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.

Fetchmail offers better security than any other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with ssh, the Secure Shell.

Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)

Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval, it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is not a full-time "push" connection.

Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf versions 1.16r8 and later.

Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in ${fetchmailsize}K of core on a Pentium under Linux.

Fetchmail is open-source software. The openness of the sources is your strongest possible assurance of quality and reliability.

Where to find out more about fetchmail:

See the Fetchmail Feature List for more about what fetchmail does.

See the on-line manual page for basics.

See the HTML Fetchmail FAQ for troubleshooting help.

See the Fetchmail Design Notes for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.

See the project's To-Do list for indications of known problems and requested features.

How to get fetchmail:

You can get any of the following leading-edge resources here:

The detached GPG signature for the binary tarball can be used to check it for correctness, with the command

gpg --verify fetchmail-$version.tar.gz.asc fetchmail-$version.tar.gz

MD5 checksums are available for these files; the checksum file is cryptographically signed and can be verified with the command:

gpg --verify checksums

EOF if [ $version != $goldvers ] then cat >>index.html <Or you can get the last \`gold' version, $goldname:

The detached GPG signature for the binary tarball can be used to check it for correctness, with the command

gpg --verify fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz.asc fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz

For differences between the leading-edge $version and gold $goldname versions, see the distribution NEWS file.

EOF fi cat >>index.html <(Note that the binary RPMs don't have the POP2, OTP, IPv6, Kerberos, GSSAPI, Compuserve RPA, Microsoft NTLM, or GNU gettext internationalization support compiled in. To get any of these you will have to build from sources.)

The latest version of fetchmail is also carried in the Metalab remote mail tools directory.

Getting help with fetchmail:

There is a fetchmail-friends list for people who want to discuss fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at fetchmail-friends@ccil.org. There is also an announcements-only list, fetchmail-announce@lists.ccil.org.

Note: before submitting a question to the list, please read the FAQ (especially item G3 on how to report bugs). We tend to get the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like a blanket.

Fetchmail was written and is maintained by Eric S. Raymond. There are some designated backup maintainers (Rob Funk, David DeSimone aka Fuzzy Fox, Dave Bodenstab and Sunil Shetye). Other backup maintainers may be added in the future, in order to ensure continued support should Eric S. Raymond drop permanently off the net for any reason.

You can help improve fetchmail:

I welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code, you can help fetchmail improve.

If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be able help improve fetchmail by lending me a test account on your site. Note that I do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a maildrop. Nor am I interested in collecting maildrops per se -- what I'm collecting is different kinds of servers.

Before each release, I run a test harness that sends date-stamped test mail to each site on my regression-test list, then tries to retrieve it. Please take a look at my list of test servers. If you can lend me an account on a kind of server that is not already on this list, please do.

Who uses fetchmail:

Fetchmail entered full production status with the 2.0.0 version in November 1996 after about five months of evolution from the ancestral popclient utility. It has since come into extremely wide use in the Internet/Unix/Linux community. The Red Hat, Debian and Suse Linux distributions and their derivatives all include it. A customized version is used at Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. Several large ISPs are known to recommend it to Unix-using SLIP and PPP customers.

Somewhere around a thousand people have participated on the fetchmail beta lists (at time of current release there were $subscribers on the friends and announce lists). While it's hard to count the users of open-source software, we can estimate based on (a) population figures at the WELL and other known fetchmail sites, (b) the size of the Linux-using ISP customer base, and (c) the volume of fetchmail-related talk on USENET. These estimates suggest that daily fetchmail users number well into the hundreds of thousands, and possibly over a million.

The sociology of fetchmail:

The fetchmail development project was a sociological experiment as well as a technical effort. I ran it as a test of some theories about why the Linux development model works.

I wrote a paper, The Cathedral And The Bazaar, about these theories and the project. I developed the line of analysis it suggested in two later essays. These papers became quite popular and (to my continuing astonishment) may have actually helped change the world. Chase the title link, above, for links to all three papers.

I have done some analysis on the information in the project NEWS file. You can view a statistical history showing levels of participation and release frequency over time.

Recent releases and where fetchmail is going:

Fetchmail is now sufficiently stable and effective that I'm getting very little pressure to fix things or add features. Development has slowed way down, release frequency has dropped off, and we're basically in maintainance mode.

Major changes or additions therefore seem unlikely until there are significant changes in or additions to the related protocol RFCs.

Where you can use fetchmail:

The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).

Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers. However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS, AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.

Related resources:

Jochen Hayek is developing a set of IMAP tools in Python that read your .fetchmailrc file and are designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on the contents of headers.

Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called install-sendmail that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.

Peter Hawkins has written a script called gotmail that can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, yosucker, can retrieve Yahoo webmail.

There's a program called mailfilter which can be used to do span filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's preconnect directive,

A hacker identifying himself simply as \`Steines' has written a filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is different from the local domain. You can find it here.

Fetchmail's funniest fan letter:

This letter still cracks me up whenever I reread it.

The fetchmail button:

If you use fetchmail and like it, here's a nifty fetchmail button you can put on your web page:

Thanks to Steve Matuszek for the graphic design. The hand in the button (and the larger top-of-page graphic) was actually derived from a color scan of the fetchmail author's hand.

Fetchmail mirror sites:

There is a FTP mirror of the current sources and RPMs in Japan at ftp://ftp.win.ne.jp/pub/network/mail/fetchmail.

Reviews and Awards

Fetchmail was DaveCentral's Best Of Linux winner for June 30 1999.

Fetchmail was a five-star Editor's Pick at Softlandindia.