Fetchmail
NEWS: NOW HOSTED BY SOURCEFORGE.NET AFTER BERLIOS SHUTDOWN
The BerliOS developer's website has shut down in the week following 2014 May 12th, and most of the fetchmail contents have been moved to SourceForge.net, including mailing list subscriptions, archives back to 2004, web site contents, download and Git repository. See http://sourceforge.net/projects/fetchmail/.
NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.26 RELEASE
On 2013-04-23, fetchmail-6.3.26
has been released (this is the download link), fixing a few
minor bugs, improving OpenSSL error reporting, and adding an
Esperanto-language translation.
It is a recommended update for all users and distributors. Click
here to see the change details.
SSL issues after upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0?
If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run c_rehash
/path/to/certs, where the last part is whatever argument
you give to fetchmail's sslcertpath option. Details:
please see fetchmail's FAQ item
R14..
SECURITY ALERTS
These have been moved to a separate page (click here for security information) to unclutter the front page.
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 protection against password-sniffing 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
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE> [fetchmail] Patch for IMAP idling where idling is unsupported
</TITLE>
<LINK REL="Index" HREF="index.html" >
<LINK REL="made" HREF="mailto:esr%40thyrsus.com">
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT=