#!/bin/sh # # indexgen.sh -- generate current version of fetchmail home page. # version=`sed -n index.html < Fetchmail Home Page
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The fetchmail Home Page

What fetchmail does:

Fetchmail is a free, 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, and ESMTP ETRN.

Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via SMTP, so it can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as elm(1) or Mail(1). It allows all your sytem 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, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods to avoid sending passwords en clair.

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, fast, and lightweight. It packs all its features in less than 90K of core on a Pentium under Linux.

(Fetchmail is the successor of the old popclient utility, which is officially dead.)

Where to find out more about fetchmail:

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

See the HTML Fetchmail FAQ for troubleshooting help.

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

Finally, see the distribution NEWS file for a description of changes in recent versions.

How to get fetchmail:

You can get any of the following here: (Note that the RPMs don't have the POP2 or Compuserve RPA support compiled in. To get that you will have to build from sources.)

The latest version of fetchmail is also carried in the Sunsite 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 at fetchmail-friends@thyrsus.com. There is also an announcements-only list, fetchmail-announce@thyrsus.com.

Both lists are SmartList reflectors; sign up in the usual way with a message containing the word "subscribe" in the subject line sent to fetchmail-friends-request@thyrsus.com or fetchmail-announce-request@thyrsus.com. (Similarly, "unsubscribe" in the Subject line unsubscribes you, and "help" returns general list help)

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. Actually, I'll answer the most common one right here: If you've tried everything but can't get multidrop mode to work, it is almost certainly because your DNS service (or your provider's) is broken.

Fetchmail was written and is maintained by Eric S. Raymond. Rob Funk, Al Youngwerth and Dave Bodenstab are fetchmail's designated backup maintainers. 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.

Who uses fetchmail:

Fetchmail entered full production status with the 2.0 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 and Debian Linux distributions 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.

Over four hundred people have participated on the fetchmail beta list. While it's hard to count free software users, 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 tens of thousands, and possibly over a hundred thousand.

The fetchmail paper:

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. It was well received at Linux Kongress '97 and the Atlanta Linux Expo two weeks later. I also presented it at Tim O'Reilly's Perl Conference August 19th-21st 1997. A lot of people like it.

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. One development that would stimulate a new release almost instantly is the development of a lightweight encrypted authentication method for IMAP sessions.

Where you can use fetchmail:

The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been extensively tested under 4.4BSD, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it uses GNU autoconf). It is reported to build and run correctly under AmigaOS and QNX as well.

Fetchmail's funniest fan letter:

This letter still cracks me up whenever I reread it.

Foreign Ports

Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers. However, a beta OS/2 port is available from Jason F. McBrayer.

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 fetchmail FTP directory (not this WWW home site, just the current sources and RPM) in Japan at ftp://ftp.win.or.jp/pub/network/mail/fetchmail.

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Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
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