Fetchmail Home Page

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 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 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:

Mold Remover

Mold Remover is a short python script which integrates with fetchmail 
<http://fetchmail.sourceforge.net/> and allows the user to specify the 
number of days that mail should remain on the pop3 server before being 
deleted. 

It is released under the GNU GPL <http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html>.

Usage: 
Set up fetchmail to run with keep and uidl options.
Edit the mold_remover.py file to specify the mailserver address
and login/password details. Also specify the UIDL file created by
fetchmail (this is created automatically by fetchmail when uidl option
is selected in the fetchmailrc file usually at
/var/mail/.fetchmail-UIDL-cache). Remember to chmod the moldremover
script to 700 so that passwords cannot be read. Next, edit the field to
set how many days you want the mail to be left on the server. Lastly
create a script to run moldremover.py with python which can either be
run as a cron job or as part of your connection script. It is advisable
to stop fetchmail before mold remover is run and then to restart
fetchmail afterwards. Here is an example /etc/cron.daily/ script:

#!/bin/bash
/etc/init.d/fetchmail stop >> /var/log/messages
/usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/mold_remover.py >> /var/log/messages
/etc/init.d/fetchmail start >> /var/log/messages

Please feel free to email me (jmstone@dsl.pipex.com) if you have any questions or bugfixes!

James Stone

Scott Bronson has written a fetchmail plugin (actually, a specialist MDA) called trestlemail that helps redirect multidrop mail.

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

Fetchmail's funniest fan letter:

The fetchmail button:

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.

The fetchmail Home Page

What fetchmail does:

Where to find out more about fetchmail:

Fetchmail's funniest fan letter:

The fetchmail button:

Fetchmail mirror sites:

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