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<h1 class="c1">Fetchmail Bugs and To-Do Items</h1>
<p>Note that there is a separate <a href="TODO.txt">TODO.txt</a> document of
different content than this.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<h2>Serious</h2>
<p>Let IMAP code use UID and UIDVALIDITY rather than relying on flags
that everyone can alter.</p>
<h2>Normal</h2>
<p>POP3 hang when polling mail with NUL char that is rejected (David
Greaves) <a
href="https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/fetchmail-devel/2004-October/000154.html">https://lists.berlios.de/pipermail/fetchmail-devel/2004-October/000154.html</a></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>The <a
href="http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?pkg=fetchmail&archive=no">
Debian bug-tracking page for fetchmail</a> lists other bug
reports.</p>
<h2>Cosmetic</h2>
<p>Alan Munday suggests message change MULTIDROP without ENVELOPE:</p>
<pre>
fetchmail: warning: MULTIDROP configuration for pop.example.org requires the envelope option to be set!
fetchmail: warning: Check ENVELOPE option if fetchmail sends all mail to postmaster!
</pre>
<h2>Feature requests/Wishlist items</h2>
<p>Feature request from "Ralf G. R. Bergs" <rabe@RWTH-Aachen.DE> "When
fetchmail downloads mail and Exim+SpamAssassin detecs an incoming
message as spam, fetchmail tries to bounce it. Unfortunately it uses
an incorrect hostname as part of the sender address (I've an internal
LAN with private hostnames, plus an official IP address and hostname,
and fetchmail picks the internal name of my host.) So I'd like to have
a config statement that allows me to explicitly set a senderaddress
for bounce messages."</p>
<p>In the SSL support, add authentication of Certifying Authority
(Is this a Certifying Authority we recognize?).</p>
<p>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."</p>
<p>Maybe refuse multidrop configuration unless "envelope" is _explicitly_
configured (and tell the user he needs to configure the envelope
option) and change the envelope default to nil. This would
prevent a significant class of shoot-self-in-foot problems.</p>
<p>Given the above change, perhaps treat a delivery as "temporarily
failed" (leaving the message on the server, not putting it into
.fetchids) when the header listed in the "envelope" option is not
found. (This is so you don't lose mail if you configure the wrong
envelope header.)</p>
<p>Matthias Andree writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>NOTE that the current code need optimization, if I have
unseen articles 3 and 47, fetchmail will happily request LIST for
articles 3...47 rather than just 3 and 47. In cases where the message
numbers are far apart, this involves considerable overhead - which
could be alleviated by pipelining the list commands, which needs
either asynchronous reading while sending the commands, or knowing the
send buffer, to avoid deadlocks. Unfortunately, I don't have the time
to delve deeper into the code and look around.</p>
<p>Note that such a pipelining function would be of universal use, so it
should not be in pop3.c or something. I'd think the best approach is to
call a "sender" function with the command and a callback, and the sender
will call the receiver when the send buffer is full and call the
callback function for each reply received.</p>
<p>See the ESMTP PIPELINING RFC for details on the deadlock avoidance
requirements.</p>
</blockquote>
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<address>-2003 Eric S. Raymond <a
href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
2004- Matthias Andree <a
href="mailto:matthias.andree@gmx.de"><matthias.andree@gmx.de></a></address>
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