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17 <title>The Fetchmail FAQ</title>
18 <meta name="description"
19 content="Frequently asked questions about fetchmail."/>
20 <meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, POP, POP2, POP3, IMAP, remote mail"/>
23 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
25 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
27 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
32 <h1 id="FAQ">Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</h1>
34 <p><strong>Support? Bug reports?</strong> Please read <a
35 href="#G3">G3</a> for what information is required to get your problem
36 solved as quickly as possible.</p>
38 <p>Note that this FAQ is occasionally updated from the SVN repository
39 and speaks in the past tense ("since") about a fetchmail release that is
40 not yet available. Please try a release candidate for that version in
41 case you need the new option.</p>
43 <p>If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to
44 this FAQ list, file it to one of the trackers at <a
45 href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">our BerliOS
46 project site</a> or post to one of the fetchmail mailing lists (see
49 <h1 id="Contents">Contents</h1>
51 <a href="#Contentdetail">Detailed Contents</a><br/>
52 <a href="#C_G">G. General problems</a><br/>
53 <a href="#C_B">B. Build-time problems</a><br/>
54 <a href="#C_F">F. Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</a><br/>
55 <a href="#C_C">C. Configuration questions</a><br/>
56 <a href="#C_T">T. How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</a><br/>
57 <a href="#C_S">S. How to make fetchmail work with various servers</a><br/>
58 <a href="#C_I">I. How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</a><br/>
59 <a href="#C_K">K. How to set up well-known security and authentication</a><br/>
60 <a href="#C_R">R. Runtime fatal errors</a><br/>
61 <a href="#C_H">H. Hangs and lockups</a><br/>
62 <a href="#C_D">D. Disappearing mail</a><br/>
63 <a href="#C_M">M. Multidrop-mode problems</a><br/>
64 <a href="#C_X">X. Mangled mail</a><br/>
65 <a href="#C_O">O. Other problems</a><br/>
67 <h1 id="Contentdetail">Detailed Contents</h1>
69 <h2 id="C_G">General problems</h2>
71 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br/>
72 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br/>
73 <a href="#G3">G3. Something doesn't work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
74 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br/>
75 <a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after some days.</a><br/>
76 <a href="#G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br/>
77 <a href="#G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br/>
78 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
79 <a href="#G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
80 <a href="#G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br/>
81 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a><br/>
82 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br/>
83 <a href="#G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br/>
84 <a href="#G14">G14. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br/>
85 <a href="#G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br/>
86 <a href="#G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br/>
89 <h2 id="C_B">Build-time problems</h2>
91 <a href="#B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</strike></a><br/>
92 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br/>
93 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br/>
94 <a href="#B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a><br/>
96 <h2 id="C_F">Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h2>
98 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br/>
99 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br/>
100 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a><br/>
101 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br/>
103 <h2 id="C_C">Configuration questions</h2>
105 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root
106 on my own machine?</a><br/>
107 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get
108 killed when I log out?</a><br/>
109 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use
110 with --interface?</a><br/>
111 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam
113 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
114 often than others?</a><br/>
115 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not
116 from an init script.</a><br/>
117 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
119 <a href="#C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
122 <h2 id="C_T">How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h2>
124 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br/>
125 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br/>
126 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br/>
127 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br/>
128 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br/>
129 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br/>
130 <a href="#T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a><br/>
131 <a href="#T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a><br/>
133 <h2 id="C_S">How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h2>
135 <a href="#S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</strike></a><br/>
136 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br/>
137 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br/>
138 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br/>
139 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br/>
140 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br/>
141 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br/>
143 <h2 id="C_I">How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h2>
145 <a href="#I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br/>
146 <a href="#I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br/>
147 <a href="#I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br/>
148 <a href="#I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br/>
149 <a href="#I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a><br/>
150 <a href="#I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br/>
151 <a href="#I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br/>
152 <a href="#I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or other
153 Maillennium servers?</a><br/>
154 <a href="#I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a><br/>
156 <h2 id="C_K">How to set up well-known security and authentication
159 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br/>
160 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br/>
161 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br/>
162 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br/>
163 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br/>
164 <a href="#K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to try TLS if the server
165 advertises it? Why does fetchmail use SSL even though not configured?</a><br/>
167 <h2 id="C_R">Runtime fatal errors</h2>
169 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows 'SMTP
170 connect failed' messages.</a><br/>
171 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't
173 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
175 <a href="#R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
176 normally otherwise.</strike></a><br/>
177 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
179 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
180 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after
181 an OS upgrade</a><br/>
182 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
183 messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
184 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
185 <a href="#R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</strike></a><br/>
186 <a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
187 <a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
189 <a href="#R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call" mean?</a>
191 <h2 id="C_H">Hangs and lockups</h2>
193 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
194 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
196 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
199 <h2 id="C_D">Disappearing mail</h2>
201 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
202 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
203 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
205 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
206 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
209 <h2 id="C_M">Multidrop-mode problems</h2>
211 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
212 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
213 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
214 domain properly.</a><br/>
215 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
216 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
217 <a href="#M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
218 problems.</strike></a><br/>
219 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
221 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
223 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
224 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
225 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
229 <h2 id="C_X">Mangled mail</h2>
231 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
232 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
233 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
235 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
236 being split.</a><br/>
237 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
239 <a href="#X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
240 much!</strike></a><br/>
241 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
243 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
245 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
247 <a href="#X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
248 with Domino IMAP</a><br/>
249 <a href="#X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial messages</a><br/>
252 <h2 id="C_O">Other problems</h2>
254 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
255 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
256 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
257 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
258 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
260 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
261 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
262 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
263 not the real From address?</a><br/>
264 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
265 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
266 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
268 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
270 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
271 messages over and over?</a><br/>
272 <a href="#O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
273 same?</strike></a><br/>
274 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
275 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
276 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
277 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
278 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
280 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
282 <a href="#O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
283 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter
285 <a href="#O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
286 in MSG_PEEK."</a><br/>
289 <h1 id="G">General problems</h1>
290 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
293 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
294 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
295 intermittent or dynamic-IP connection to a remote mailserver, SLIP or
296 PPP dialup, or leased line when SMTP isn't desired. Fetchmail can
297 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards to a the
298 local SMTP (via TCP socket) or LMTP (via TCP or Unix socket) listener or
299 into an MDA program, enabling all the normal
300 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local mail
301 or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
303 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
304 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
305 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
306 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
307 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
308 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
310 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">Open Source</a>
311 Software. The openness of the sources enables you to review and
312 customize the code, and contribute your changes.</p>
314 <p>A former fetchmail maintainer once claimed that Open Source software
315 were the strongest quality assurance, but the current maintainers do not
316 believe that open source alone is a criterion for quality – <a
317 href="fetchmail-SA-2005-01.txt">the remotely exploitable POP3
318 vulnerability (CVE-2005-2335)</a> lingered undiscovered in
319 fetchmail's code for years, which is a hint that open source code does
320 not audit itself.</p>
322 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
323 href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
326 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
327 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
329 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
330 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
332 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
333 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
334 href="http://www.fetchmail.info/">http://www.fetchmail.info/</a>.
335 You can also usually find both in the <a
336 href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.short.html">
337 POP mail tools directory on iBiblio</a>.</p>
339 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
340 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
341 may not be completely current.</p>
343 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. Something does not work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a></h2>
345 <p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
346 fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
347 save us both time if you upgrade and test with <a href="#G2">the latest
348 version</a> <em>before</em> sending in a bug report.</p>
350 <p>Bugs will be fixed, provided you include enough diagnostic information
351 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
352 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
353 When reporting bugs, please include the following:</p>
356 <li>Your operating system.</li>
358 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
359 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
362 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
365 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
367 <li>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail -V</kbd> called with
368 whatever other command-line options you used.</li>
370 <li><strong>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail --nodetach -vvv
371 --nosyslog</kbd> with whatever other command-line options you use
373 <p>It is very important that the transcript include your
374 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server
375 problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are
376 specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.</p>
380 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
381 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
382 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
384 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
385 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
386 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
387 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
388 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
389 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
390 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
391 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
392 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
393 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
394 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
395 introduced. <strong>Please</strong> include session transcripts (as
396 described in the last bullet point above) of <strong>both
397 the working and failing versions.</strong> Often, the source of the problem
398 can instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
401 <p>It may helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
402 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
403 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
404 the passwords first! Otherwise, fetchmail -V – as directed above
405 – will usually suffice.</p>
407 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
408 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
409 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
410 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
411 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
412 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
413 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
414 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
416 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
417 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
418 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
419 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
422 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
425 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
426 traced with a debugger such as gdb, dbx or idb.</p>
428 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
429 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
431 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed quite quickly.
432 Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the solution isn't obvious
433 when I first look, it may evade me for a long time (or to put it another
434 way, fetchmail is well enough tested that the easy bugs have long since
435 been found). So if you want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just
436 sufficient but <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to
437 easily reproduce it.</p>
439 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
440 Will you add it?</a></h2>
442 <p>If it's reasonable for fetchmail and cannot be solved with reasonable
443 effort outside of fetchmail, perhaps.</p>
445 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
446 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
447 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
448 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
449 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
451 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
452 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
453 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
454 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
456 <p>fetchmail's first job is transport though, and it should do this
457 well. If a feature would cause fetchmail to deteriorate in other
458 respects, the feature will probably not be added.</p>
460 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
461 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
462 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
463 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
464 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
465 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
467 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after
470 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
471 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
472 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
473 <code>keep</code> option. Several messaging programs with graphical
474 user interface support this feature.</p>
476 <p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
477 spare time of developers permitting.</p>
479 <p>For the time being, the contrib/ directory contains some <em>unsupported</em>
480 tools that may help, namely mold-remover.py and delete-later.</p>
482 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
485 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list
486 <fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de>
487 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
488 fetchmail. Please see <a href="#G3">G3 above for information you need to
489 report.</a> It's a Mailman list, see <a
490 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>
491 for info and subscription.</p>
492 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
493 <fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de> for people who want to discuss
494 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
495 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
496 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.</p>
497 <p>There is also an announcements-only list,
498 <fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de>, which you can sign up for at <a
499 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
501 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
502 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
504 <p>Eric S. Raymond also considered fetchmail development a sociological
505 experiment, an extended test to see if my theory about the critical
506 features of the Linux development model is correct.</p>
508 <p>He considers the experiment a success. He wrote a paper about it titled <a
509 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
510 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
511 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
512 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
513 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
514 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape told ESR it helped
516 href="http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
517 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
519 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
520 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
522 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
525 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
526 that conforms to the relevant standards/RFCs (and even some outright
527 broken ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
528 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally
529 well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without UIDL,
530 limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
533 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
534 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
535 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
536 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by using the
537 'Probe for supported protocols' function in the fetchmailconf
538 utility - unfortunately it does not detect SSL-wrapped variants).</p>
540 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
541 IMAP4rev1 or UIDL-capable POP3 server.</p>
543 <p>A decent POP3/IMAP server that has recently become popular is <a
544 href="http://dovecot.org/">Dovecot</a>.</p>
546 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
547 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
549 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
550 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
552 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
553 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
554 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
555 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
556 popular Unix mail agents – <a
557 href="http://www.instinct.org/elm/">elm</a>, <a
558 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
559 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
560 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> – will work fine with
563 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
564 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. Mutt's interface
565 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
566 elm, but its flexibility and excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it
567 in a class by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though.
570 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
573 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
574 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
577 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
578 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
579 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
580 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
581 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
582 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
584 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
585 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
586 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
587 to use end-to-end encryption such as GnuPG (see below) on your whole
588 mail stream so none of it can be read. One of the advantages of
589 fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able
590 to arrange encryption by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
592 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
593 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
594 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
595 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
596 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GnuPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
597 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
599 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
600 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
601 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
602 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
605 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
606 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
607 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
608 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
611 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, it'll have CRAM-MD5
612 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
615 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
616 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
617 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
618 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
619 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
620 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
621 For some hosts, you need to register a secret on the host (using
622 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like that). Specify the
623 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
624 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
625 back the the server for verification. Note that APOP is no longer
626 considered secure since March 2007.</p>
628 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
629 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
630 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
633 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
634 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
635 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
636 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
637 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
638 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
641 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
642 use their RPA authentication. See <a href="#I1">I1</a> for details.
643 If you are fetching mail from
644 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
646 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
647 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
648 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
649 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
650 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
651 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
652 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
653 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
655 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
656 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
657 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
659 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
660 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
661 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
662 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
664 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
665 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
667 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
668 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
670 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
671 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO
672 address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
673 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
674 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
675 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
677 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
678 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
679 client machine had when it started up.</p>
681 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
682 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
683 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
684 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
685 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
686 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
688 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
689 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
690 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
691 or you can use the IP address itself.)</p>
693 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
694 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
695 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
696 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
697 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
699 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
700 option when initially developing your poll configuration – it's
701 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
702 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
703 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
706 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
707 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
708 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
709 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
710 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
711 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
712 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
715 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
716 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
717 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
718 still not yet widely deployed, as of 2006.</p>
720 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
721 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
722 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname you're giving
723 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
724 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
725 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
732 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
735 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
738 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
739 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
740 mailhost.) See the <a
741 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
744 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
745 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
747 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
748 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
749 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
750 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
753 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
754 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
756 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
757 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
759 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
760 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
762 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
763 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
764 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
765 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
766 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
768 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
769 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
770 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
771 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
772 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
774 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
775 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
777 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
779 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
780 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
781 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
782 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
785 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
786 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
788 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
789 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
790 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
791 different problem.</p>
793 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
794 heavy loads?</a></h2>
796 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
797 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
798 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
799 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory. It will store
800 the UID or UIDL data in core however, which can become considerable if
801 you are keeping lots of messages on the server.</p>
803 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
804 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
805 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
806 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
807 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
809 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
810 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
811 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
812 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
813 but not necessarily latency).</p>
816 <h1>Build-time problems</h1>
817 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
818 FreeBSD.</strike></a></h2>
820 <p style="font-style:italic;">As of release 6.3.0, fetchmail's
821 Makefile[.in] should work flawlessly with BSD's portable make used on
822 FreeBSD. With older releases, use GNU make (usually installed as
823 <code>gmake</code>; otherwise try <kbd>pkg_add -r gmake</kbd>).</p>
825 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
826 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
828 <p>fetchmail 6.3.0 and newer ship with the lexer and parser in .c
829 formats, so you do not need to use lex unless you hacked the .l or .y
832 <p>fetchmail's lexer has been developed with GNU flex and uses some of
833 its specialties, so the lexer cannot be compiled with the lex tools
834 shipped by some UNIX vendors (HP, SGI, Sun).</p>
836 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
837 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
839 <p>If you get errors resembling these:</p>
842 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
843 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
844 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
845 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
846 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
849 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
850 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
852 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
856 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
857 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
858 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
859 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
860 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
861 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
862 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
863 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
866 <p>install an up to date version of GNU gettext, reconfigure and rebuild
867 fetchmail. If that does not help, reconfigure with '--disable-nls' added
868 to the "./configure" command and rebuild.</p>
870 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
873 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
876 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h1>
877 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
878 longer work?</a></h2>
880 <h3>If your file predates 6.3.0</h3>
882 <p>The <tt>netsec</tt> option was discontinued and needs to be
885 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
887 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
888 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
890 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
892 <p>The <tt>'via localhost'</tt> special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
893 gone. Use the <tt>%h</tt> feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
895 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
897 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
898 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
899 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
901 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
903 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
904 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
905 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
906 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
907 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
909 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
910 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
911 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
912 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
913 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
915 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
916 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
917 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
919 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
921 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
922 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
924 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
926 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
927 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
928 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
929 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
930 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
933 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
935 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
936 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
937 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
938 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
939 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
940 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
942 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
943 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
944 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
947 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
948 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
949 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
950 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
952 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
953 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
954 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
955 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
956 contact the maintainer.</p>
958 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
960 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
961 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
962 parser will utter a warning.</p>
964 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
966 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
967 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
968 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
969 attached to a server entry.</p>
971 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
972 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
973 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
976 poll openmail protocol pop3
977 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
980 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
981 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
984 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
985 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
987 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
989 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
990 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
992 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
993 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
994 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
996 <p>If you had something like</p>
999 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
1002 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
1003 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
1004 'defaults' declaration.</p>
1006 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
1007 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1009 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1010 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1012 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1015 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1016 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1017 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1020 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1021 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1023 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1024 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1026 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1027 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1028 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1029 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1031 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1032 around your token.</p>
1034 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1035 don't understand.</a></h2>
1037 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1038 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1039 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1040 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1042 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1043 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1044 feature to work.</p>
1047 <h1>Configuration questions</h1>
1048 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1049 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1051 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1053 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1054 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1057 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1060 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1061 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1062 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1063 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1067 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1071 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1072 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1074 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1075 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1076 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1081 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1082 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1083 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1084 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1086 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1087 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1090 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1091 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1094 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1095 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1096 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1097 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1100 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1101 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1102 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1103 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1105 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1106 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1108 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1109 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1110 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1111 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1112 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1113 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1115 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1116 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1117 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1118 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1119 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1120 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1122 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1123 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1125 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1126 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1128 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1129 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1130 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1131 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1134 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1135 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1136 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1137 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1138 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1139 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1142 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1143 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1144 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1145 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1146 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1147 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1148 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1149 one secure link.</p>
1151 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1154 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1157 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1160 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1161 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1162 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1163 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1164 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1167 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1170 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1171 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1172 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1174 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1175 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1176 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1177 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1180 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1181 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1182 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1183 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1184 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1187 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1188 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1189 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1190 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1193 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1196 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1197 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1200 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1203 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1204 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1206 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1207 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1208 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1210 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1211 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1212 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1213 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1215 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1216 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1219 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1220 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1224 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1225 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1226 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1227 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1228 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti_spam.html">sendmail
1229 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1231 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1234 makemap hash deny <deny
1237 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1239 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1240 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1241 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1242 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1243 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1245 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1246 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1247 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1250 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1251 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1253 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1254 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1255 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1256 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1259 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1260 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1263 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1264 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1265 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1266 every 30 minutes.</p>
1268 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1269 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1271 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1272 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1273 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1274 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1275 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1277 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1278 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1281 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1284 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1285 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1286 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1288 <h2><a id="C8" name="C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
1291 <p>Some users want to write scripts that take action only if mail
1292 could/could not be retrieved, thus fetchmail reports if it has retrieved
1293 messages or not.</p>
1295 <p>If you do not want "no mail" to be an error condition (for instance,
1296 for cron jobs), use a POSIX-compliant shell and add this to the end of
1297 the fetchmail command line, it will change an exit code of 1 to 0 and
1303 <p>If you want to map more than one code to 0, you cannot cascade multiple
1304 <strong>|| [ $? -eq N ]</strong>, but you must instead use the
1305 <strong>-o</strong> operator inside the brackets, (see the test(1)
1306 manpage for details), such as:</p>
1309 || [ $? -eq 1 -o $? -eq 9 ]
1312 <p>A full cron line might then look like this:</p>
1315 */15 * * * * fetchmail -s || [ $? -eq 1 ]
1320 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
1321 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1324 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1325 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1326 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1327 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1329 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1330 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1331 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1333 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1334 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1335 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1337 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1338 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1339 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1340 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1342 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1343 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1344 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1345 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1346 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1347 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1348 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1349 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1351 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1352 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1356 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1359 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1360 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1361 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1362 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1363 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1364 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1365 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1366 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1367 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1368 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1372 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1374 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1375 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1376 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1377 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1380 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1381 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1382 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1383 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1384 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1385 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1388 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1389 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1390 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1391 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1392 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1393 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1395 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1396 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1397 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1400 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1401 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1402 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1403 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1404 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1405 at start of a text line.</p>
1407 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1410 <h3>qmail as your local SMTP server</h3>
1412 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
1413 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
1415 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1416 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1418 (This information contributed by Robert de Bath
1419 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1421 <h3>qmail as your ISP's POP3 server</h3>
1423 <p>Note that qmail's POP3 server, as of version 1.03 and netqmail 1.05,
1424 miscalculates the message sizes, so you may see size-related fetchmail
1427 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package, then it is usually possible
1428 to set up one fetchmail link to reliably collect the mail for an entire
1431 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1432 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1433 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1434 on this line. One major reason for this is to prevent mail
1435 loops, the other is to transport envelope information which is essential
1436 for multidrop (domain-in-a-mailbox) schemes.</p>
1438 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site, the
1439 ISP-mailhost will have normally put that site in its 'virtualhosts'
1440 control file so it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this
1441 site. This results in mail sent to
1442 'username@userhost.userdom.example.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1446 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.example.com
1449 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1452 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.example.com
1455 <p>The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1456 but a string matching the user host name is likely.</p>
1458 <p>To use this line you must:</p>
1461 <li>Ensure the option '<code>envelope "Delivered-To"</code>' is in the fetchmail
1464 <li>Ensure the option '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' is
1465 in the fetchmail config file, in order to remove this prefix from the
1466 username. (added by Luca Olivetti)</li>
1468 <li>Ensure you have a <code>localdomains</code> option containing
1469 '<code>userdom.example.com</code>' or '<code>userhost.userdom.example.com</code>'
1473 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1476 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1478 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1479 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1480 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1481 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1482 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1484 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1485 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1486 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1489 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1492 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1494 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1495 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1496 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1497 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1498 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1499 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1501 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1502 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1503 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1504 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1507 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1508 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1509 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1513 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1516 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1517 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1518 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1519 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1521 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1524 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1525 work fine out of the box.</p>
1527 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1528 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1529 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1530 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1531 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1534 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1535 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1536 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1537 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1538 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1539 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1540 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1542 <p>You may also need to say
1543 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1544 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1545 recipient addresses.</p>
1547 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1550 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1551 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1553 href="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1554 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1557 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1560 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1561 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1562 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1564 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1567 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1568 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1569 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1571 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1573 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1575 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1578 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
1579 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1580 qpopper?</strike></a></h2>
1582 <p><em>The information that used to be here was obsolete and dropped.</em></p>
1584 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1587 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1588 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1589 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1590 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1591 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1592 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1594 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1595 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1596 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1598 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP usually supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1599 with Microsoft Exchange servers. "Usually" here means that it fails on some
1600 servers for reasons that we haven't been able to debug yet, perhaps it's
1601 related to the NTLM domain.</p>
1603 <p>To enable this NTLM mode, configure fetchmail with
1604 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1605 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1606 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1609 <p>Microsoft Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1610 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1611 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1612 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1615 <p>Fetchmail works with Microsoft Exchange, despite this brain damage.
1616 Two features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1617 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1618 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1619 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1620 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1621 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1623 <p>ESR learned that there's supposed to be a
1624 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1627 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1628 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1631 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1632 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1635 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1637 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1639 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1641 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1644 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1646 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1648 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1650 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1651 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1653 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1655 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1656 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1659 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1661 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1664 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1667 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1668 System\Pop3 Performance
1672 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1674 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1675 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1677 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1678 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1679 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1681 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1683 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1687 <p>The Microsoft employee who revealed this information to ESR
1688 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1691 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1692 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1693 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1695 <blockquote><p>This means that Exchange Server is too [...] stupid to
1696 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1697 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1698 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1699 name from your username.</p>
1701 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1702 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1703 username maps to zero mailboxes.</p>
1705 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1708 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1709 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1711 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1712 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1716 <p>But, the best option involves finding a server that runs better
1719 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1722 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1723 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1724 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1725 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1726 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1727 Resent- headers.</p>
1728 <p>OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1731 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1732 command fails, returning only one line regardless of its argument,
1733 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1735 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1737 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server is (according to the designer of
1738 IMAP) unusably broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required
1739 content length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1741 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem to some extent, but no guarantees.</p>
1743 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1744 InterChange?</a></h2>
1746 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1747 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server (<a
1748 href="#S6">see below</a>):
1749 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1750 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1752 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent ESR mail informing
1753 him that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixed this
1756 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1758 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1759 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1760 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1762 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1763 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1764 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1765 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1766 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1768 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1770 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1771 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1772 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1776 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h1>
1777 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1779 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1780 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1781 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1782 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1783 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1784 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1787 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1788 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1789 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1790 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1791 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1792 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1793 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1794 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1795 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1797 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1798 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1800 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1801 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1804 # This version will use RPA
1805 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1806 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1807 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1809 # This version will not use RPA
1810 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1811 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1812 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1815 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1816 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1818 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1820 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1821 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1822 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1823 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1825 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1826 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1827 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1830 set postmaster "philh"
1831 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1832 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1835 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1837 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1838 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1839 maildrop, like this:</p>
1842 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1843 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1846 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1847 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1848 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1849 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1850 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1851 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1852 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1855 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1856 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1860 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1861 30 days old; see their <a
1862 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/producthelp/mail/sdps-tech.html/">POP3
1863 page</a> for details.</p>
1865 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1867 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1868 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1869 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1870 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1872 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1873 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1874 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1875 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1878 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1879 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1880 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1883 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1884 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1885 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1887 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1890 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1891 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1892 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1893 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1894 certainly a server bug.</p>
1896 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1897 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1898 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1899 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1900 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1901 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1903 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1904 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1905 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1907 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1908 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1910 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1911 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1912 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1913 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1914 any of the following headers.</p>
1916 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "--mda" switch:</p>
1919 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1922 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1924 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1925 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1926 already been read.</p>
1928 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1930 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1931 webmail with the help of the <a
1932 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1933 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1934 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1935 configuration should look like this:</p>
1938 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1939 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1940 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
1944 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
1945 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
1947 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1949 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1950 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1951 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
1953 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
1954 as the only appropriate response.</p>
1956 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1957 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1958 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
1961 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1963 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
1964 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
1965 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
1966 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
1969 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or
1970 other Maillennium servers?</a></h2>
1972 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a
1973 Maillennium POP3/PROXY server... <em>but</em> this server will
1974 truncate "TOP" responses after 64 - 82 kB (we have varying reports),
1975 in violation of Internet Standard #53 aka. RFC-1939 (POP3). Don't
1976 mistake this for a fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.) Comcast
1977 documented they haven't understood what this is about in <a
1978 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2004-April/008523.html">two
1979 messages from April 2004.</a></p>
1981 <p>Beginning with version 6.3.2, fetchmail will fall back to the RETR
1982 command if the greeting string contains "Maillennium POP3/PROXY server",
1983 and print a warning message. This means however that fetchmail has no
1984 means to prevent the "seen" flag from being set on the server (Note that
1985 officially, POP3 has no notion of seen tracking, but it works for some
1988 <p>Workaround for older versions: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1990 <h2><a id="I9" name="I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a></h2>
1992 <p>Google's IMAP servers, as of April 2008, are broken and re-encode
1993 MIME-encoded headers improperly and are not feature-complete yet. The
1994 model how their servers organize mail also deviates in significant ways
1995 from what the POP3 or IMAP protocol 'fathers' conceived. This means all
1996 sorts of strange effects, for instance, your sent mail may show up in
1997 the mail that fetchmail fetches. It's best to avoid fetching mail from
1998 Google until they are using standards-compliant software.</p>
2001 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
2003 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
2005 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a <kbd>--with-socks</kbd> compile-time option
2006 that supports linking with socks library. If you specify the value of
2007 this option as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2008 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2009 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2011 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar <kbd>--with-socks5</kbd> option that may
2012 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2014 <p>In either case, fetchmail has no direct configuration hooks, but you
2015 can specify which socks configuration file the library should read by
2016 means of the <tt>SOCKS_CONF</tt> environment variable. In order to
2017 bypass the SOCKS proxy altogether, you could run (adding your usual
2018 options to the end of this line):</p>
2020 <pre>env SOCKS_CONF=/dev/null fetchmail</pre>
2022 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2025 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2026 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2029 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2031 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/</a></p>
2033 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2038 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2039 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2042 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2045 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2049 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2052 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2053 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2054 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2055 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2056 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2057 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2058 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2059 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2061 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2062 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2063 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2064 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2066 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2067 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2069 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2070 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share
2071 Kerberos V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2072 IMAP server - those are few.</p>
2074 <p>fetchmail does not compile in support for GSS by
2075 default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
2076 distribution (available via FTP at <a
2077 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
2078 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2079 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2080 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2081 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2082 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2084 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2085 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2086 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2087 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2088 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2089 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2090 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2092 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2093 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2094 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2095 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2096 Kerberos principal.</p>
2098 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2099 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2101 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2104 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2105 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed, and they
2106 should at least be version 0.9.6.
2107 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2108 installed in commonly-used default locations, this will
2109 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2110 you'll need to specify the OpenSSL installation directory as an argument
2111 to --with-ssl after an equal sign.</p>
2113 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2114 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2115 SSL encryption, and will automatically use <code>tls</code> if the
2116 server offers it. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2117 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2118 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2120 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2121 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2122 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2123 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2124 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2125 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2127 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2128 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2129 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2130 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2132 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2133 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work (but will not
2134 authenticate the server):</p>
2137 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2138 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2141 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2142 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2143 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2144 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2145 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2147 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2148 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2149 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2150 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2151 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2152 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2154 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2155 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2156 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2159 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2160 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2161 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2162 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2163 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2164 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2167 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2171 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2172 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2175 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2176 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2179 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2180 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2181 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2182 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2183 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2184 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2185 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2187 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2188 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2189 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2190 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2191 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2194 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2195 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar
2196 ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2199 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2200 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2201 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2202 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2204 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2205 if the server advertises it? Why does fetchmail use SSL even
2206 though not configured?</a></h2>
2208 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2209 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2210 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2211 his certificates properly.</p>
2213 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2214 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2216 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2218 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2219 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2220 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2221 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2224 <h1>Runtime fatal errors</h1>
2225 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2226 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2228 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2229 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2231 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2232 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2233 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2234 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2235 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2237 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2238 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2239 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2241 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2242 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2243 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2244 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2245 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2246 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2247 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2249 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2250 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2251 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2253 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2254 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2255 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2256 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2257 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2258 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2260 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2261 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2262 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2263 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2265 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2266 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2267 than one IP address.</p>
2269 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2270 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2271 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2277 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2278 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2279 Make sure it says something like</p>
2285 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2288 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2289 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2290 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2291 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2292 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2294 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2295 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2296 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2297 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2299 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2300 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2301 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2303 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2304 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2306 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2307 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2309 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2310 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2311 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2312 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2314 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2315 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2316 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2319 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2320 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2322 <p>Note that this bug should no longer occur when using prepackaged
2323 fetchmail versions or installing unmodified original tarballs, since
2324 these ship with a proper parser .c file.</p>
2326 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2327 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2328 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2329 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2331 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2333 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2334 href="http://flex.sourceforge.net/">flex</a>.</p>
2336 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2337 operates normally otherwise.</strike></a></h2>
2339 <p><em>The information that used to be here referred to bugs in Linux libc5
2340 systems, which are deemed obsolete by now.</em></p>
2342 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2343 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2346 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2347 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2348 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2349 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2350 report no problem.</p>
2352 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2353 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2354 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2355 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2357 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2358 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2361 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2364 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2365 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2366 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2367 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2368 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2369 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2371 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2374 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2375 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2376 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2377 are option values that work:</p>
2384 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2385 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2386 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2387 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2388 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2389 corresponding IP address.</p>
2391 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2392 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2394 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2395 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2396 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2397 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2400 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2401 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2403 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2404 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2408 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2409 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2410 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2411 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2412 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2414 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2415 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2416 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2417 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2420 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2422 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2423 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2427 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2430 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2431 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2432 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2433 packet-fragmentation problem or improper firewall settings break Path
2434 MTU discovery (when for instance all ICMP traffic is blocked), that's
2435 where you'll see it.</p>
2437 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2438 SIGPIPE.</strike></a></h2>
2440 <p><em>Fetchmail 6.3.5 and newer block SIGPIPE, and many older versions have
2441 already handled this signal, so you shouldn't be seeing SIGPIPE
2444 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2445 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2447 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2448 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2450 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2451 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2452 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2453 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2454 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2455 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2456 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2457 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2458 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table
2459 summary="Common port addresses for IMAP, POP3 and their SSL
2461 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2462 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2463 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2464 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2465 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2468 <h2><a id="R13" name="R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call"
2471 <p>Non-fatal signals (such as timers set by fetchmail itself) can
2472 interrupt long-running functions and will then be reported as
2473 "Interrupted system call". These can sometimes be timeouts.</p>
2476 <h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
2477 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2480 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2481 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2482 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2484 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2487 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2488 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2491 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2494 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2495 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2496 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2497 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2499 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2502 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2504 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2506 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2514 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2517 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2521 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2524 <p>For more details consult the file
2525 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2527 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2530 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2531 but hangs returning:</p>
2534 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2535 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2536 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2537 .......fetchmail: flushed
2538 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2539 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2542 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2545 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2549 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
2550 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2551 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2553 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2554 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2556 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2557 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2558 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2560 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2561 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2563 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2567 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2570 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2572 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2573 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2575 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2576 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2577 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2578 also truncates long lines at column 1024.)</p>
2580 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2581 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Better ones will restore it
2582 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2583 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2585 <p>Good servers are designed to restore the entire queue, including
2586 messages you have deleted. If you have one of these and it flakes out on
2587 you a lot, try setting a small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This
2588 will result in more IP connects to the server, but will mean it actually
2589 executes changes to the queue more often.</p>
2591 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2592 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2594 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2595 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2596 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2597 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2598 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2600 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2601 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2602 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2603 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2604 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2605 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2606 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2608 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2611 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org/">IMAP4</a>
2615 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems</h1>
2616 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2617 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2619 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2620 recipient names it parses out of Envelope-header lines (or these are
2621 improperly configured) as
2622 matching a name within the designated domains. To check this, run
2623 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2624 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2625 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2627 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of configuration
2630 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2631 necessary) and add enough '<code>aka</code>' declarations to cover all
2632 of your mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2633 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be uncollected if
2634 it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you don't have listed).</p>
2636 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2637 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2639 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2640 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2642 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2643 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2644 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2645 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2647 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2648 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2649 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2650 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2651 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2652 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2654 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2655 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2656 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2657 MAILBOXES on the man page, and check what is needed at <a
2658 href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/mail/multidrop">Matthias
2659 Andree's "Requisites for working multidrop
2660 mailboxes"</a>). If you want to try it, the way to do it is
2661 with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2663 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2666 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2667 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2669 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2670 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2671 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2672 multidrop routing.</p>
2674 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2676 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2677 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2678 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2679 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2681 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2682 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2683 that is useless for rerouting purposes. In this particular case, sell
2684 your ISP a clue. If that does not work, you may have to set
2685 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2686 bamboozled by this, but a missing envelope makes multidrop routing
2689 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2690 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2693 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2694 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2696 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2697 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2698 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2699 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2701 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2702 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2704 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2705 having DNS problems.</strike></a></h2>
2707 <p><em>The answer that used to be here no longer applies to
2710 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2711 message is processed.</a></h2>
2713 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2714 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2715 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2718 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2719 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2720 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2722 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2723 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2724 address is valid.</p>
2726 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2727 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2729 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2730 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2731 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2732 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2733 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2735 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2736 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2739 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2741 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2742 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2743 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2746 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2749 #############################################
2750 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2751 #############################################
2753 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2755 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2756 ---------------------------
2758 -------------------------
2759 # handle virtual users
2761 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2762 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2763 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2764 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2765 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2768 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2769 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2770 work. Michael says:</p>
2772 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2773 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2774 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2777 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2778 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2780 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2781 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2782 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2785 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2787 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2788 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2789 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2790 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2792 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2793 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2794 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2795 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2796 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2798 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2800 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2803 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2804 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2805 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2808 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2809 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2810 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2811 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2812 as an alias of your server.</p>
2814 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2817 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2818 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2819 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2820 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2821 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2823 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2824 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2825 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2826 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2827 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2828 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2831 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2832 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2833 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2834 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2837 <p>The real solution however is to make sure that fetchmail can find the
2838 envelope recipient properly, which will reliably prevent this message
2842 <h1>Mangled mail</h1>
2843 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2844 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2846 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2847 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2848 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2849 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2850 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2852 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2853 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2854 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2855 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2856 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as maildrop) and
2857 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2859 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2862 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2863 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2864 the server and choked on by an old version of
2865 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2867 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2868 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2869 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2870 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2872 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at the start of
2873 line are being split.</a></h2>
2875 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2876 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2877 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2880 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2881 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2882 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2883 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2885 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2886 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2887 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2890 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2891 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2892 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2893 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2894 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2895 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2896 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2897 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2899 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2900 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2903 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2906 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2907 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2908 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2909 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2911 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2912 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2913 different way</a></h2>
2915 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2916 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2917 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2918 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
2921 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
2922 order they pass your mail:</p>
2925 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
2927 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
2929 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
2931 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
2933 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2934 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
2937 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
2938 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
2939 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
2940 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
2941 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
2943 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
2944 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
2945 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
2948 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2951 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
2952 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
2953 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
2954 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
2955 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
2956 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
2958 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
2959 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
2960 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
2961 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
2962 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
2964 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
2965 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
2966 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
2967 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
2968 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
2969 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
2970 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
2972 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
2973 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
2974 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
2975 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
2976 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
2977 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
2978 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
2979 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
2980 actual password.</p>
2982 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
2983 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
2984 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
2985 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
2986 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
2987 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
2988 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
2989 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
2990 operating system.</p>
2992 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
2993 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
2994 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
2995 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
2996 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
2997 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
2999 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3000 fetching too much!</strike></a></h2>
3002 <p><em>The information that used to be here pertained to fetchmail 4.4.7 or
3003 older, which should not be used. Use a recent fetchmail version.</em></p>
3005 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3006 or mangled.</a></h2>
3008 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3009 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3010 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3011 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3012 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3014 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3015 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3016 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3017 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3018 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3019 only effective solution.</p>
3021 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3022 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3023 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3026 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3027 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3028 you're having this problem. The <a
3029 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3032 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3033 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3036 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3037 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3038 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3039 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3042 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3043 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3044 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3045 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3046 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3047 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3048 generates different Boundary tags for each part, e.g. one tag is
3049 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3050 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3051 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3052 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3054 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3055 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3056 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3057 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3058 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3059 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3061 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3062 attachments is the <a
3063 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3065 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3066 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3067 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3068 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3069 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3072 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3073 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3074 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3075 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3078 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3083 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3084 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3085 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3086 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3088 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3091 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3092 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3096 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3097 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3098 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3099 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3100 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3101 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3102 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3103 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3104 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3105 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3106 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3107 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3108 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3110 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3113 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3115 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3117 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3119 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3120 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3122 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3124 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3127 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3128 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3129 internet interoperability.</p>
3131 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3132 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3133 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3134 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3135 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3136 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3137 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3138 mailtool's format.</p>
3140 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3143 <p>Fetchmail doesn't know anything about mail attachments and doesn't
3144 treat them any differently from plain message data.</p>
3146 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3147 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3148 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3149 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3150 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3151 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3152 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3153 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3155 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3156 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3157 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3158 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3159 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3160 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3162 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3165 <p>Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3166 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100 %.
3167 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3168 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3169 the message end.</p>
3171 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3172 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3175 <ol><li>Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3176 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3177 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</li>
3179 <li>The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3180 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3181 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3182 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3183 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3184 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3187 <li>Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3188 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3189 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3190 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3197 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p></li>
3199 <li>Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3200 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange goofs it up.</li>
3202 <li>As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3203 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3204 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</li>
3207 <p>There is no fix for this.</p>
3209 <h2><a id="X9" name="X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
3210 with Domino IMAP</a></h2>
3212 <p>Domino 6 IMAP was found by Anthony Kim in February 2006 to
3213 erroneously omit the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header in messages
3214 downloaded through IMAP, causing messages to display improperly. This
3215 happened with Domino's incoming mail format configured to "Prefers
3216 MIME". Solution: switch Domino to "Keep in Sender's format".</p>
3219 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2006-March/010015.html">Anthony
3223 <h2><a id="X10" name="X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial
3226 <p>Fetchmail is sometimes reported to deliver partial messages. This
3227 is usually related to network outages that occur while fetchmail is
3228 downloading a message body. In such cases, fetchmail has downloaded a
3229 complete header, so your header will be intact. The message body will be
3230 truncated, and fetchmail will later attempt to redownload the
3231 message (providing the server is standards conformant).</p>
3233 <p>The reason for the truncation is that fetchmail streams the body
3234 directly from the POP3/IMAP server into the SMTP/LMTP server or MDA (in
3235 order to save memory), so fetchmail has already written a part of the
3236 message before it notices it will be incomplete, and fetchmail cannot
3237 abort a transaction it has started, and it's unclear if it ever will be
3238 able to, because this is not standardized and the outcome will depend on
3239 the receiving software (be it SMTP/LMTP or MDA).</p>
3242 <h1>Other problems</h1>
3243 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3244 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3246 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3247 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3248 the log file, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts.
3249 To get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3250 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it already
3253 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message,
3254 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3256 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3257 which Mozilla and other clients don't do; the announcement of
3258 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3259 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3265 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3271 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3272 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3273 /etc/inetd.conf file and reload (or restart) inetd.</p>
3275 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3288 to solve the problem system-wide.
3290 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3291 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3293 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3294 your rc file and restart, reading it. Note that this causes troubles if
3295 you need to provide a password via the console, unless you're running in
3296 --nodetach mode.</p>
3298 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3299 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3301 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3302 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3303 fix this, but there is a workaround: use the --expunge option with a
3304 reasonably low figure that works for you. Try 10 for a start.</p>
3306 <p>IMAP is less susceptible to this problem, because the "deleted"
3307 message marks are persistent, but they aren't in POP3. Note that the
3308 --expunge default for IMAP is different than the default for POP3.</p>
3310 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3311 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3312 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3313 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3315 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3316 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3318 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3319 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3322 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3323 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3324 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3325 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3326 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3328 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3329 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3330 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3332 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3333 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3334 the log will look right.</p>
3336 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3337 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3339 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3340 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3342 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3343 to fail and time out. Check your <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>,
3344 <code>/etc/host.conf</code>, <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> (if you
3345 have the latter two) and you <code>/etc/hosts</code> files. Make sure
3346 your hostname and fully-qualified domain name are both in
3347 <code>/etc/hosts</code>, and that hosts is looked at before DNS is
3348 queried. You probably also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the
3351 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
3352 with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3354 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3355 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3356 Switching to a faster MTA like <a
3357 href="http://www.postfix.org/">Postfix</a> might help.</p>
3359 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3360 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3362 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3365 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3366 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3367 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3369 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3370 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3371 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3372 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3373 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3376 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3378 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3379 option working?</a></h2>
3381 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3382 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3383 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3384 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3385 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3386 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3387 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3388 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3390 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3391 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3393 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3394 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3395 turn one of them off - which one, depends on why they have been set in
3396 the first place, and to a lesser degree on the upstream server.</p>
3398 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3399 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3400 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3401 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3402 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3403 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3404 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3406 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my
3407 messages the same?</strike></a></h2>
3409 <p><em>The answer that used to be here made no sense and was dropped.</em></p>
3411 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3412 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3414 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.
3415 Because some servers like to drop the connection after that probe,
3416 fetchmail will re-poll immediately with this probe defeated.</p>
3418 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3419 get the message only once per run.</p>
3421 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3422 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3424 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3426 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3428 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3429 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3430 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3431 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3433 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3435 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3436 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3437 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3438 your local server is.</p>
3440 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>, which is not
3441 recommended though, as it may cause mail loss.</p>
3443 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3446 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3448 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3450 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3451 does something like "date >> $HOME/fetchmail.log".</p>
3453 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3456 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> (available since release 6.3.0) to
3457 delete oversized mails along with the <code>--limit</code> option. If
3458 you are already having <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete
3459 oversized mails, <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to
3460 avoid losing mails unintentionally.</p>
3462 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3463 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3464 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3465 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3466 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3467 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3468 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3470 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3473 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3474 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3475 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3476 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3477 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3478 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3483 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3484 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3485 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3486 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3487 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3488 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3491 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3492 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3493 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3494 with the data reset to initial values.
3498 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3499 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3500 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3501 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3503 <h2><a name="O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
3504 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter format?</a></h2>
3506 <p>All the world uses ISO-216:1975 "A4" paper except for North America.
3507 Using A4 format reaches far more people than (formerly known as DIN A4,
3508 from DIN 476) format. Besides that, A4 paper <em>is</em> available in North
3510 For further information on the Letter-vs-A4 story, see:</p>
3511 <ul><li><a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html">Markus
3512 Kuhn: "International standard paper sizes"</a></li>
3514 href="http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/">Brian
3515 Forte: "A4 vs US Letter"</a></li></ul>
3517 <p>Offering the document formatted for two different paper sizes would
3518 bloat the package beyond reason, and formatting in a way that fits A4
3519 and Letter paper formats would be a waste of paper in most parts of the
3520 world. For that reason, fetchmail only ships with an A4 formatted PDF
3523 <p>To create a letter-sized PDF, install <a
3524 href="http://www.htmldoc.org/">HTMLDOC</a>, edit
3525 <code>fetchmail-FAQ.book</code> in the source directory with your
3526 favorite text editor, replace <samp>--size A4</samp> by <samp>--size
3527 letter</samp>, and type:
3530 make fetchmail-FAQ.pdf
3533 <h2><a name="O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
3534 in MSG_PEEK."</a></h2>
3535 <p>That's in fact a bug in Linux kernels around the late 2.6.2X versions,
3536 rather than fetchmail. Fetchmail has no race bugs around MSG_PEEK,
3537 as of version 6.3.9. The message can safely be ignored.</p>
3540 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
3542 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
3544 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
3549 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3550 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3551 Matthias Andree</address>