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.

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.

SMTP authentication a la RFC 2554 ought to be supported. The Exim reference has a whole chapter on this topic.

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.

I had to remove the getopt.c and getopt1.c files from the distribution because the SSL library is under a GPL-incompatible license. Albert Chin-A-Young writes "Another option is another GPL-compatible SSL distribution. I think NSS from Mozilla fits the bill (I think Evolution uses this):" and gives the URL . Somebody who cares about Solaris or HP-UX should port fetchmail to use this.

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