#!/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, Compuservs 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 and is a SmartList reflector; sign up in the usual way with a message containing the word "subscribe" in the subject line sent to to fetchmail-friends-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. 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 popcl