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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
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<title>Fetchmail</title>
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<div id="Header">
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page header">
<tr>
<td>Fetchmail</td>
<td align="right"><!-- update date -->2011-08-21</td>
</tr>
</table>
</div>
<div id="Menu">
<hr>
<a href="index.html" title="Main">Main</a><br>
<a href="fetchmail-features.html">Features</a><br>
<a href="fetchmail-man.html">Manual</a><br>
<a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html" title="Fetchmail FAQ">FAQ</a><br>
<a href="fetchmail-FAQ.pdf" title="Fetchmail FAQ as PDF">FAQ (PDF)</a><br>
<a href="design-notes.html">Design Notes</a><br>
<a href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">Download</a><br>
<a href="security.html">Security/Errata</a><br>
<a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail/">Development</a><br>
<a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">Project Page</a><br>
<hr>
</div>
<div id="Content">
<img src="bighand.png" width="100" height="71" alt="logo: a hand presenting an envelope" align="right">
<h1>Fetchmail</h1>
<div style="background-color:#c0ffc0;color:#000000;">
<h1>NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.21 RELEASE</h1>
<p>On 2012-08-29, <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824&release_id=18743">fetchmail-6.3.22
has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
denial-of service in STARTTLS and makes --keep configurations log
less verbosely.
<br>It is a recommended <strong>security update</strong> for all users and
distributors. <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=18743">Click
here to see the change details.</a>
</p>
<h1>SSL issues after upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0?</h1>
<p>If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run <kbd>c_rehash
/path/to/certs</kbd>, where the last part is whatever argument
you give to fetchmail's <code>sslcertpath</code> option. Details:
please <a
href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#R14">see fetchmail's FAQ item
R14.</a>.</p>
</div>
<div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
<p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
front page.
<p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
</div>
<h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
Pentium under Linux.</p>
<p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
software</a>.</p>
<h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
<p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
about what fetchmail does.</p>
<p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
basics.</p>
<p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
troubleshooting help.</p>
<p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
<p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
of known problems and requested features.</p>
<p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
<p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
page</a> for more, including <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
<h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
<p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
a blanket.</p>
<p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
<br>There is also a
fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
<br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
<h1>Maintainer History</h1>
<p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
adding IMAP support.</p>
<p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
<h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
<p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
<p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
<p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
<h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
<p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
<p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
<h1>Related works</h1>
<h2>Similar software</h2>
<p><strong>fdm:</strong> A recently appeared software package that integrates basic filtering is <a href="http://fdm.sourceforge.net/">Nicholas Marriott's fdm</a>.
<p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
stalled before the latest team took over, <a
href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
competition.</p>
<p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo �lvarez Mart�nez's Animail</a>.</p>
<h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
<p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
<a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
IMAP tools in Python</a> 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.</p>
<!-- no longer true
<p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
<a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
-->
<p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
Yahoo webmail.</p>
<p>There's a program called
<a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
<code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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