Fetchmail

NEWS: IMAP7 in mailbox names (developer document)

There is a new document about mailbox name encoding in IMAP, an invited contribution by Mark Crispin. It applies to all IMAP clients and servers and is not limited to fetchmail, and arose after a discussion on the getmail mailing list. Note that as of 2010-05-25, neither fetchmail nor getmail currently supports this directly; for the nonce, you need to manually encode the mailbox name in UTF-7 for both applications.

SSL issues after upgrade to 6.3.16/6.3.17 or 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..

NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.17 RELEASE

On 2010-05-06, fetchmail-6.3.17 has been released (this is the download link), fixing a regression of the rcfile parser from 6.3.0, a security bug in debug output that can cause memory exhaustion and abort, and improves SSL usability. It is a recommended update for all users. Click here to see the change details.

SECURITY ALERTS

These have been moved to a separate page (click here for security information) to unclutter the front page.

Please update to the newest fetchmail version.

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

#!/bin/sh
# Test MDA for debugging fetchmail configurations.
echo "[testmda called with the following arguments: $*]"

# Display the input
cat >/tmp/testmda$$
echo "[text is "`wc -c </tmp/testmda$$`" bytes long]"
cat /tmp/testmda$$
rm /tmp/testmda$$

Complementary and extension software

Jochen Hayek is developing a set of IMAP tools in Python that read your .fetchmailrc file and are designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on the contents of headers.

Peter Hawkins has written a script called gotmail that can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, yosucker, can retrieve Yahoo webmail.

There's a program called mailfilter which can be used to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's preconnect directive.

A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is different from the local domain. You can find it here.