Fetchmail Bugs and To-Do Items

I try to respond to urgent bug reports in a timely way. But fetchmail is now pretty mature and I have many other projects, so I don't personally chase obscure or marginal problems. Help with any of these will be cheerfully accepted.

Matthias Andree writes: I believe fetchmail should not iterate over protocols when we have a DNS failure.

IDLE is not fully implemented. Fetchmail does not time out the idle connection every 30 minutes or less as required by RFC2177. Some servers (including UW IMAPD compiled without the MICROSOFT_BRAIN_DAMAGE option, as is the default) will drop the connection after 30 minutes, resulting in a spurious socket error in your logs and no mail being picked up until the next poll cycle.

The UIDL code seems rather broken. It's a nasty swamp. Somebody who actually uses it should fix it -- every time I try I seem to make things worse....

POP3 can't presently distinguish a wedged or down server from an authentication failure. Possible fix: after issuing a PASS command. wait 300 (xx) seconds for a "-ERR" or a "+OK" . If nothing comes back, retry at the next poll event and generate no errors. If we get an -ERR then log an authentication failure.

It has been reported that multidrop name matching fails when the name to be matched contains a Latin-1 umlaut. Dollars to doughnuts this is some kind of character sign-extension problem. Trouble is, it's very likely in the BIND libraries. Someone should go in with a debugger and check this.

In the SSL support, add authentication of Certifying Authority (Is this a Certifying Authority we recognize?).

Laszlo Vecsey writes: "I believe qmail uses a technique of writing temporary files to nfs, and then moving them into place to ensure that they're written. Actually a hardlink is made to the temporary file and the destination name in a new directory, then the first one is unlinked.. maybe a combination of this will help with the fetchmail lock file."

Move everything to using service strings rather that port numbers, so we can get rid of ENABLE_INET6 everywhere but in SockOpen (this will get rid of the kluge in rcfile_y.y).

John Summerfield suggests that specifying a localname containing @ ought to be treated as an smtpname option, with the domain part removed for other purposes such as local-address matching.

The Debian bug-tracking page for fetchmail lists other bug reports.