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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 Git 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><br />
190 <a href="#R14">R14. Since upgrading fetchmail/OpenSSL, I can no longer connect!</a><br />
191 <a href="#R15">R15. Help, I'm getting Authorization failure!</a><br />
193 <h2 id="C_H">Hangs and lockups</h2>
195 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
196 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
198 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
201 <h2 id="C_D">Disappearing mail</h2>
203 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
204 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
205 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
207 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
208 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
211 <h2 id="C_M">Multidrop-mode problems</h2>
213 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
214 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
215 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
216 domain properly.</a><br/>
217 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
218 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
219 <a href="#M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
220 problems.</strike></a><br/>
221 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
223 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
225 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
226 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
227 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
231 <h2 id="C_X">Mangled mail</h2>
233 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
234 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
235 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
237 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
238 being split.</a><br/>
239 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
241 <a href="#X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
242 much!</strike></a><br/>
243 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
245 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
247 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
249 <a href="#X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
250 with Domino IMAP</a><br/>
251 <a href="#X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial messages</a><br/>
254 <h2 id="C_O">Other problems</h2>
256 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
257 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
258 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
259 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
260 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
262 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
263 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
264 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
265 not the real From address?</a><br/>
266 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
267 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
268 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
270 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
272 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
273 messages over and over?</a><br/>
274 <a href="#O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
275 same?</strike></a><br/>
276 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
277 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
278 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
279 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
280 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
282 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
284 <a href="#O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
285 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter
287 <a href="#O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
288 in MSG_PEEK."</a><br/>
291 <h1 id="G">General problems</h1>
292 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
295 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
296 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
297 intermittent or dynamic-IP connection to a remote mailserver, SLIP or
298 PPP dialup, or leased line when SMTP isn't desired. Fetchmail can
299 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards to a the
300 local SMTP (via TCP socket) or LMTP (via TCP or Unix socket) listener or
301 into an MDA program, enabling all the normal
302 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local mail
303 or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
305 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
306 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
307 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
308 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
309 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
310 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
312 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">Open Source</a>
313 Software. The openness of the sources enables you to review and
314 customize the code, and contribute your changes.</p>
316 <p>A former fetchmail maintainer once claimed that Open Source software
317 were the strongest quality assurance, but the current maintainers do not
318 believe that open source alone is a criterion for quality – <a
319 href="fetchmail-SA-2005-01.txt">the remotely exploitable POP3
320 vulnerability (CVE-2005-2335)</a> lingered undiscovered in
321 fetchmail's code for years, which is a hint that open source code does
322 not audit itself.</p>
324 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
325 href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html">GNU General Public
326 License v2</a>. Details, including an exception that allows linking
327 against OpenSSL, are in the COPYING file in the fetchmail
330 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
331 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
333 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
334 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
336 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
337 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
338 href="http://www.fetchmail.info/">http://www.fetchmail.info/</a>.
339 You can also usually find both in the <a
340 href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.short.html">
341 POP mail tools directory on iBiblio</a>.</p>
343 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
344 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
345 may not be completely current.</p>
347 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. Something does not work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a></h2>
349 <p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
350 fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
351 save us both time if you upgrade and test with <a href="#G2">the latest
352 version</a> <em>before</em> sending in a bug report.</p>
354 <p>Bugs will be fixed, provided you include enough diagnostic information
355 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
356 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
357 When sending bugs or asking for help, please <strong>do not make up
358 information except your password</strong> and please
359 <strong>report</strong> the following:</p>
362 <li>Your operating system.</li>
364 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
365 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
368 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
371 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
373 <li>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail -V</kbd> called with
374 whatever other command-line options you used.</li>
376 <li><strong>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail --nodetach -vvv
377 --nosyslog</kbd> with whatever other command-line options you use
379 <p>It is very important that the transcript include your
380 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server
381 problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are
382 specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.</p>
386 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
387 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
388 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
390 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
391 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
392 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
393 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
394 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
395 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
396 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
397 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
398 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
399 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
400 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
401 introduced. <strong>Please</strong> include session transcripts (as
402 described in the last bullet point above) of <strong>both
403 the working and failing versions.</strong> Often, the source of the problem
404 can instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
407 <p>It may helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
408 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
409 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
410 the passwords first! Otherwise, fetchmail -V – as directed above
411 – will usually suffice.</p>
413 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
414 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
415 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
416 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
417 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
418 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
419 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
420 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
422 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
423 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
424 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
425 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
428 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
431 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
432 traced with a debugger such as gdb, dbx or idb.</p>
434 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
435 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
437 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed quite quickly.
438 Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the solution isn't obvious
439 when I first look, it may evade me for a long time (or to put it another
440 way, fetchmail is well enough tested that the easy bugs have long since
441 been found). So if you want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just
442 sufficient but <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to
443 easily reproduce it.</p>
445 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
446 Will you add it?</a></h2>
448 <p>If it's reasonable for fetchmail and cannot be solved with reasonable
449 effort outside of fetchmail, perhaps.</p>
451 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
452 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
453 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
454 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
455 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
457 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
458 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
459 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
460 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
462 <p>fetchmail's first job is transport though, and it should do this
463 well. If a feature would cause fetchmail to deteriorate in other
464 respects, the feature will probably not be added.</p>
466 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
467 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
468 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
469 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
470 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
471 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
473 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after
476 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
477 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
478 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
479 <code>keep</code> option. Several messaging programs with graphical
480 user interface support this feature.</p>
482 <p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
483 spare time of developers permitting.</p>
485 <p>For the time being, the contrib/ directory contains some <em>unsupported</em>
486 tools that may help, namely mold-remover.py and delete-later.</p>
488 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
491 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list
492 <fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de>
493 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
494 fetchmail. Please see <a href="#G3">G3 above for information you need to
495 report.</a> It's a Mailman list, see <a
496 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>
497 for info and subscription.</p>
498 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
499 <fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de> for people who want to discuss
500 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
501 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
502 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.</p>
503 <p>There is also an announcements-only list,
504 <fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de>, which you can sign up for at <a
505 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
507 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
508 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
510 <p>Eric S. Raymond also considered fetchmail development a sociological
511 experiment, an extended test to see if my theory about the critical
512 features of the Linux development model is correct.</p>
514 <p>He considers the experiment a success. He wrote a paper about it titled <a
515 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
516 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
517 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
518 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
519 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
520 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape told ESR it helped
522 href="http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
523 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
525 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
526 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
528 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
531 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
532 that conforms to the relevant standards/RFCs (and even some outright
533 broken ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
534 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally
535 well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without UIDL,
536 limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
539 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
540 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
541 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
542 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by using the
543 'Probe for supported protocols' function in the fetchmailconf
544 utility - unfortunately it does not detect SSL-wrapped variants).</p>
546 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
547 IMAP4rev1 or UIDL-capable POP3 server.</p>
549 <p>A decent POP3/IMAP server that has recently become popular is <a
550 href="http://dovecot.org/">Dovecot</a>.</p>
552 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
553 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
555 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
556 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
558 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
559 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
560 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
561 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
562 popular Unix mail agents – <a
563 href="http://www.instinct.org/elm/">elm</a>, <a
564 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
565 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
566 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> – will work fine with
569 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
570 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. Mutt's interface
571 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
572 elm, but its flexibility and excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it
573 in a class by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though.
576 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
579 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
580 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
583 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
584 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
585 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
586 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
587 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
588 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
590 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
591 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
592 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
593 to use end-to-end encryption such as GnuPG (see below) on your whole
594 mail stream so none of it can be read. One of the advantages of
595 fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able
596 to arrange encryption by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
598 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
599 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
600 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
601 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
602 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GnuPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
603 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
605 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
606 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
607 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
608 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
611 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
612 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
613 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
614 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
617 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, it'll have CRAM-MD5
618 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
621 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
622 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
623 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
624 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
625 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
626 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
627 For some hosts, you need to register a secret on the host (using
628 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like that). Specify the
629 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
630 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
631 back the the server for verification. Note that APOP is no longer
632 considered secure since March 2007.</p>
634 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
635 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
636 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
639 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
640 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
641 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
642 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
643 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
644 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
647 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
648 use their RPA authentication. See <a href="#I1">I1</a> for details.
649 If you are fetching mail from
650 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
652 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
653 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
654 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
655 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
656 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
657 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
658 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
659 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
661 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
662 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
663 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
665 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
666 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
667 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
668 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
670 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
671 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
673 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
674 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
676 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
677 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO
678 address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
679 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
680 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
681 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
683 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
684 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
685 client machine had when it started up.</p>
687 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
688 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
689 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
690 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
691 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
692 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
694 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
695 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
696 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
697 or you can use the IP address itself.)</p>
699 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
700 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
701 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
702 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
703 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
705 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
706 option when initially developing your poll configuration – it's
707 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
708 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
709 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
712 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
713 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
714 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
715 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
716 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
717 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
718 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
721 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
722 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
723 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
724 still not yet widely deployed, as of 2006.</p>
726 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
727 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
728 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname you're giving
729 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
730 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
731 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
738 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
741 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
744 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
745 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
746 mailhost.) See the <a
747 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
750 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
751 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
753 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
754 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
755 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
756 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
759 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
760 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
762 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
763 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
765 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
766 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
768 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
769 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
770 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
771 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
772 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
774 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
775 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
776 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
777 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
778 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
780 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
781 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
783 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
785 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
786 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
787 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
788 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
791 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
792 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
794 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
795 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
796 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
797 different problem.</p>
799 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
800 heavy loads?</a></h2>
802 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
803 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
804 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
805 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory. It will store
806 the UID or UIDL data in core however, which can become considerable if
807 you are keeping lots of messages on the server.</p>
809 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
810 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
811 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
812 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
813 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
815 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
816 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
817 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
818 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
819 but not necessarily latency).</p>
822 <h1>Build-time problems</h1>
823 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
824 FreeBSD.</strike></a></h2>
826 <p style="font-style:italic;">As of release 6.3.0, fetchmail's
827 Makefile[.in] should work flawlessly with BSD's portable make used on
828 FreeBSD. With older releases, use GNU make (usually installed as
829 <code>gmake</code>; otherwise try <kbd>pkg_add -r gmake</kbd>).</p>
831 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
832 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
834 <p>fetchmail 6.3.0 and newer ship with the lexer and parser in .c
835 formats, so you do not need to use lex unless you hacked the .l or .y
838 <p>fetchmail's lexer has been developed with GNU flex and uses some of
839 its specialties, so the lexer cannot be compiled with the lex tools
840 shipped by some UNIX vendors (HP, SGI, Sun).</p>
842 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
843 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
845 <p>If you get errors resembling these:</p>
848 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
849 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
850 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
851 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
852 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
855 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
856 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
858 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
862 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
863 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
864 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
865 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
866 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
867 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
868 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
869 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
872 <p>install an up to date version of GNU gettext, reconfigure and rebuild
873 fetchmail. If that does not help, reconfigure with '--disable-nls' added
874 to the "./configure" command and rebuild.</p>
876 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
879 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
882 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h1>
883 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
884 longer work?</a></h2>
886 <h3>If your file predates 6.3.0</h3>
888 <p>The <tt>netsec</tt> option was discontinued and needs to be
891 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
893 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
894 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
896 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
898 <p>The <tt>'via localhost'</tt> special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
899 gone. Use the <tt>%h</tt> feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
901 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
903 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
904 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
905 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
907 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
909 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
910 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
911 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
912 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
913 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
915 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
916 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
917 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
918 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
919 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
921 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
922 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
923 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
925 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
927 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
928 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
930 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
932 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
933 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
934 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
935 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
936 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
939 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
941 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
942 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
943 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
944 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
945 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
946 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
948 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
949 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
950 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
953 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
954 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
955 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
956 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
958 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
959 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
960 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
961 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
962 contact the maintainer.</p>
964 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
966 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
967 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
968 parser will utter a warning.</p>
970 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
972 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
973 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
974 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
975 attached to a server entry.</p>
977 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
978 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
979 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
982 poll openmail protocol pop3
983 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
986 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
987 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
990 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
991 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
993 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
995 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
996 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
998 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
999 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
1000 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
1002 <p>If you had something like</p>
1005 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
1008 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
1009 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
1010 'defaults' declaration.</p>
1012 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
1013 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1015 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1016 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1018 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1021 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1022 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1023 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1026 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1027 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1029 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1030 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1032 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1033 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1034 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1035 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1037 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1038 around your token.</p>
1040 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1041 don't understand.</a></h2>
1043 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1044 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1045 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1046 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1048 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1049 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1050 feature to work.</p>
1053 <h1>Configuration questions</h1>
1054 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1055 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1057 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1059 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1060 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1063 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1066 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1067 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1068 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1069 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1073 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1077 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1078 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1080 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1081 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1082 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1087 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1088 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1089 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1090 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1092 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1093 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1096 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1097 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1100 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1101 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1102 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1103 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1106 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1107 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1108 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1109 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1111 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1112 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1114 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1115 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1116 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1117 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1118 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1119 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1121 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1122 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1123 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1124 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1125 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1126 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1128 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1129 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1131 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1132 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1134 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1135 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1136 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1137 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1140 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1141 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1142 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1143 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1144 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1145 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1148 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1149 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1150 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1151 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1152 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1153 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1154 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1155 one secure link.</p>
1157 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1160 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1163 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1166 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1167 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1168 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1169 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1170 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1173 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1176 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1177 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1178 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1180 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1181 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1182 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1183 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1186 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1187 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1188 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1189 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1190 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1193 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1194 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1195 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1196 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1199 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1202 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1203 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1206 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1209 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1210 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1212 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1213 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1214 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1216 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1217 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1218 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1219 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1221 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1222 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1225 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1226 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1230 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1231 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1232 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1233 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1234 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti_spam.html">sendmail
1235 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1237 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1240 makemap hash deny <deny
1243 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1245 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1246 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1247 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1248 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1249 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1251 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1252 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1253 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1256 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1257 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1259 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1260 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1261 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1262 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1265 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1266 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1269 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1270 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1271 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1272 every 30 minutes.</p>
1274 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1275 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1277 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1278 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1279 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1280 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1281 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1283 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1284 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1287 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1290 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1291 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1292 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1294 <h2><a id="C8" name="C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
1297 <p>Some users want to write scripts that take action only if mail
1298 could/could not be retrieved, thus fetchmail reports if it has retrieved
1299 messages or not.</p>
1301 <p>If you do not want "no mail" to be an error condition (for instance,
1302 for cron jobs), use a POSIX-compliant shell and add this to the end of
1303 the fetchmail command line, it will change an exit code of 1 to 0 and
1309 <p>If you want to map more than one code to 0, you cannot cascade multiple
1310 <strong>|| [ $? -eq N ]</strong>, but you must instead use the
1311 <strong>-o</strong> operator inside the brackets, (see the test(1)
1312 manpage for details), such as:</p>
1315 || [ $? -eq 1 -o $? -eq 9 ]
1318 <p>A full cron line might then look like this:</p>
1321 */15 * * * * fetchmail -s || [ $? -eq 1 ]
1326 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
1327 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1330 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1331 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1332 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1333 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1335 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1336 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1337 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1339 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1340 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1341 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1343 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1344 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1345 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1346 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1348 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1349 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1350 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1351 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1352 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1353 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1354 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1355 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1357 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1358 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1362 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1365 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1366 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1367 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1368 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1369 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1370 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1371 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1372 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1373 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1374 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1378 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1380 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1381 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1382 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1383 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1386 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1387 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1388 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1389 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1390 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1391 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1394 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1395 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1396 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1397 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1398 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1399 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1401 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1402 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1403 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1406 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1407 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1408 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1409 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1410 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1411 at start of a text line.</p>
1413 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1416 <h3>qmail as your local SMTP server</h3>
1418 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
1419 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
1421 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1422 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1424 (This information contributed by Robert de Bath
1425 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1427 <h3>qmail as your ISP's POP3 server</h3>
1429 <p>Note that qmail's POP3 server, as of version 1.03 and netqmail 1.05,
1430 miscalculates the message sizes, so you may see size-related fetchmail
1433 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package, then it is usually possible
1434 to set up one fetchmail link to reliably collect the mail for an entire
1437 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1438 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1439 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1440 on this line. One major reason for this is to prevent mail
1441 loops, the other is to transport envelope information which is essential
1442 for multidrop (domain-in-a-mailbox) schemes.</p>
1444 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site, the
1445 ISP-mailhost will have normally put that site in its 'virtualhosts'
1446 control file so it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this
1447 site. This results in mail sent to
1448 'username@userhost.userdom.example.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1452 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.example.com
1455 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1458 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.example.com
1461 <p>The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1462 but a string matching the user host name is likely.</p>
1464 <p>To use this line you must:</p>
1467 <li>Ensure the option '<code>envelope "Delivered-To"</code>' is in the fetchmail
1470 <li>Ensure the option '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' is
1471 in the fetchmail config file, in order to remove this prefix from the
1472 username. (added by Luca Olivetti)</li>
1474 <li>Ensure you have a <code>localdomains</code> option containing
1475 '<code>userdom.example.com</code>' or '<code>userhost.userdom.example.com</code>'
1479 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1482 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1484 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1485 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1486 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1487 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1488 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1490 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1491 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1492 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1495 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1498 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1500 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1501 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1502 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1503 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1504 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1505 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1507 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1508 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1509 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1510 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1513 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1514 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1515 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1519 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1522 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1523 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1524 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1525 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1527 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1530 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1531 work fine out of the box.</p>
1533 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1534 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1535 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1536 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1537 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1540 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1541 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1542 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1543 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1544 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1545 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1546 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1548 <p>You may also need to say
1549 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1550 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1551 recipient addresses.</p>
1553 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1556 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1557 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1559 href="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1560 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1563 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1566 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1567 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1568 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1570 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1573 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1574 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1575 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1577 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1579 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1581 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1584 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
1585 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1586 qpopper?</strike></a></h2>
1588 <p><em>The information that used to be here was obsolete and dropped.</em></p>
1590 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1593 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1594 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1595 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1596 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1597 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1598 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1600 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1601 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1602 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1604 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP usually supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1605 with Microsoft Exchange servers. "Usually" here means that it fails on some
1606 servers for reasons that we haven't been able to debug yet, perhaps it's
1607 related to the NTLM domain.</p>
1609 <p>To enable this NTLM mode, configure fetchmail with
1610 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1611 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1612 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1615 <p>Microsoft Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1616 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1617 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1618 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1621 <p>Fetchmail works with Microsoft Exchange, despite this brain damage.
1622 Two features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1623 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1624 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1625 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1626 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1627 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1629 <p>ESR learned that there's supposed to be a
1630 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1633 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1634 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1637 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1638 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1641 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1643 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1645 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1647 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1650 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1652 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1654 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1656 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1657 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1659 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1661 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1662 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1665 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1667 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1670 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1673 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1674 System\Pop3 Performance
1678 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1680 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1681 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1683 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1684 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1685 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1687 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1689 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1693 <p>The Microsoft employee who revealed this information to ESR
1694 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1697 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1698 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1699 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1701 <blockquote><p>This means that Exchange Server is too [...] stupid to
1702 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1703 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1704 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1705 name from your username.</p>
1707 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1708 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1709 username maps to zero mailboxes.</p>
1711 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1714 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1715 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1717 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1718 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1722 <p>But, the best option involves finding a server that runs better
1725 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1728 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1729 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1730 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1731 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1732 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1733 Resent- headers.</p>
1734 <p>OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1737 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1738 command fails, returning only one line regardless of its argument,
1739 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1741 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1743 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server is (according to the designer of
1744 IMAP) unusably broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required
1745 content length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1747 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem to some extent, but no guarantees.</p>
1749 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1750 InterChange?</a></h2>
1752 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1753 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server (<a
1754 href="#S6">see below</a>):
1755 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1756 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1758 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent ESR mail informing
1759 him that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixed this
1762 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1764 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1765 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1766 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1768 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1769 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1770 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1771 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1772 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1774 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1776 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1777 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1778 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1782 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h1>
1783 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1785 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1786 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1787 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1788 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1789 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1790 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1793 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1794 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1795 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1796 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1797 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1798 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1799 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1800 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1801 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1803 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1804 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1806 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1807 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1810 # This version will use RPA
1811 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1812 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1813 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1815 # This version will not use RPA
1816 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1817 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1818 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1821 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1822 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1824 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1826 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1827 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1828 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1829 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1831 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1832 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1833 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1836 set postmaster "philh"
1837 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1838 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1841 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1843 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1844 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1845 maildrop, like this:</p>
1848 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1849 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1852 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1853 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1854 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1855 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1856 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1857 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1858 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1861 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1862 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1866 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1867 30 days old; see their <a
1868 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/producthelp/mail/sdps-tech.html/">POP3
1869 page</a> for details.</p>
1871 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1873 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1874 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1875 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1876 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1878 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1879 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1880 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1881 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1884 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1885 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1886 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1889 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1890 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1891 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1893 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1896 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1897 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1898 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1899 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1900 certainly a server bug.</p>
1902 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1903 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1904 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1905 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1906 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1907 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1909 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1910 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1911 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1913 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1914 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1916 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1917 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1918 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1919 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1920 any of the following headers.</p>
1922 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "--mda" switch:</p>
1925 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1928 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1930 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1931 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1932 already been read.</p>
1934 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1936 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1937 webmail with the help of the <a
1938 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1939 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1940 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1941 configuration should look like this:</p>
1944 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1945 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1946 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
1950 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
1951 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
1953 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1955 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1956 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1957 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
1959 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
1960 as the only appropriate response.</p>
1962 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1963 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1964 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
1967 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1969 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
1970 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
1971 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
1972 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
1975 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or
1976 other Maillennium servers?</a></h2>
1978 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a
1979 Maillennium POP3/PROXY server... <em>but</em> this server will
1980 truncate "TOP" responses after 64 - 82 kB (we have varying reports),
1981 in violation of Internet Standard #53 aka. RFC-1939 (POP3). Don't
1982 mistake this for a fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.) Comcast
1983 documented they haven't understood what this is about in <a
1984 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2004-April/008523.html">two
1985 messages from April 2004.</a></p>
1987 <p>Beginning with version 6.3.2, fetchmail will fall back to the RETR
1988 command if the greeting string contains "Maillennium POP3/PROXY server",
1989 and print a warning message. This means however that fetchmail has no
1990 means to prevent the "seen" flag from being set on the server (Note that
1991 officially, POP3 has no notion of seen tracking, but it works for some
1994 <p>Workaround for older versions: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1996 <h2><a id="I9" name="I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a></h2>
1998 <p>Google's IMAP servers, as of April 2008, are broken and re-encode
1999 MIME-encoded headers improperly and are not feature-complete yet. The
2000 model how their servers organize mail also deviates in significant ways
2001 from what the POP3 or IMAP protocol 'fathers' conceived. This means all
2002 sorts of strange effects, for instance, your sent mail may show up in
2003 the mail that fetchmail fetches. It's best to avoid fetching mail from
2004 Google until they are using standards-compliant software.</p>
2007 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
2009 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
2011 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a <kbd>--with-socks</kbd> compile-time option
2012 that supports linking with socks library. If you specify the value of
2013 this option as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2014 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2015 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2017 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar <kbd>--with-socks5</kbd> option that may
2018 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2020 <p>In either case, fetchmail has no direct configuration hooks, but you
2021 can specify which socks configuration file the library should read by
2022 means of the <tt>SOCKS_CONF</tt> environment variable. In order to
2023 bypass the SOCKS proxy altogether, you could run (adding your usual
2024 options to the end of this line):</p>
2026 <pre>env SOCKS_CONF=/dev/null fetchmail</pre>
2028 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2031 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2032 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2035 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2037 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/</a></p>
2039 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2044 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2045 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2048 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2051 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2055 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2058 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2059 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2060 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2061 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2062 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2063 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2064 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2065 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2067 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2068 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2069 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2070 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2072 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2073 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2075 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2076 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share
2077 Kerberos V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2080 <p>fetchmail does not compile in support for GSS by
2081 default, since it requires libraries from a Kerberos V
2082 distribution, such as <a href="http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/">MIT
2083 Kerberos</a> or <a href="http://www.h5l.org/">Heimdal
2086 <p>If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2087 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2088 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2089 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2090 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2092 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2093 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2094 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2095 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2096 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2097 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2098 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2100 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2101 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2102 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2103 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2104 Kerberos principal.</p>
2106 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2107 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2109 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2112 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2113 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed, and they
2114 should at least be version 0.9.7.
2115 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2116 installed in commonly-used default locations, this will
2117 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2118 you'll need to specify the OpenSSL installation directory as an argument
2119 to --with-ssl after an equal sign.</p>
2121 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2122 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2123 SSL encryption, and will automatically use <code>tls</code> if the
2124 server offers it. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2125 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2126 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2128 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2129 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2130 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2131 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2132 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2133 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2135 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2136 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2137 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2138 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2140 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2141 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work (but will not
2142 authenticate the server):</p>
2145 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2146 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2149 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2150 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2151 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2152 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2153 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2155 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2156 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2157 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2158 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2159 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2160 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2162 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2163 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2164 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2167 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2168 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2169 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2170 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2171 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2172 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2175 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2179 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2180 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2183 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2184 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2187 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2188 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2189 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2190 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2191 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2192 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2193 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2195 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2196 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2197 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2198 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2199 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2202 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2203 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar
2204 ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2207 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2208 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2209 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2210 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2212 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2213 if the server advertises it? Why does fetchmail use SSL even
2214 though not configured?</a></h2>
2216 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2217 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2218 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2219 his certificates properly.</p>
2221 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2222 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2224 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2226 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2227 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2228 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2229 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2232 <h1>Runtime fatal errors</h1>
2233 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2234 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2236 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2237 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2239 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2240 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2241 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2242 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2243 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2245 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2246 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2247 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2249 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2250 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2251 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2252 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2253 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2254 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2255 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2257 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2258 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2259 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2261 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2262 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2263 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2264 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2265 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2266 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2268 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2269 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2270 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2271 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2273 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2274 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2275 than one IP address.</p>
2277 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2278 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2279 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2285 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2286 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2287 Make sure it says something like</p>
2293 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2296 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2297 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2298 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2299 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2300 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2302 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2303 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2304 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2305 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2307 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2308 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2309 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2311 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2312 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2314 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2315 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2317 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2318 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2319 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2320 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2322 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2323 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2324 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2327 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2328 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2330 <p>Note that this bug should no longer occur when using prepackaged
2331 fetchmail versions or installing unmodified original tarballs, since
2332 these ship with a proper parser .c file.</p>
2334 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2335 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2336 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2337 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2339 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2341 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2342 href="http://flex.sourceforge.net/">flex</a>.</p>
2344 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2345 operates normally otherwise.</strike></a></h2>
2347 <p><em>The information that used to be here referred to bugs in Linux libc5
2348 systems, which are deemed obsolete by now.</em></p>
2350 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2351 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2354 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2355 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2356 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2357 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2358 report no problem.</p>
2360 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2361 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2362 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2363 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2365 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2366 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2369 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2372 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2373 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2374 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2375 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2376 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2377 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2379 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2382 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2383 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2384 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2385 are option values that work:</p>
2392 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2393 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2394 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2395 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2396 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2397 corresponding IP address.</p>
2399 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2400 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2402 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2403 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2404 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2405 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2408 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2409 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2411 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2412 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2416 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2417 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2418 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2419 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2420 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2422 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2423 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2424 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2425 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2428 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2430 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2431 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2435 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2438 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2439 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2440 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2441 packet-fragmentation problem or improper firewall settings break Path
2442 MTU discovery (when for instance all ICMP traffic is blocked), that's
2443 where you'll see it.</p>
2445 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2446 SIGPIPE.</strike></a></h2>
2448 <p><em>Fetchmail 6.3.5 and newer block SIGPIPE, and many older versions have
2449 already handled this signal, so you shouldn't be seeing SIGPIPE
2452 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2453 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2455 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2456 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2458 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2459 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2460 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2461 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2462 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2463 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2464 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2465 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2466 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table
2467 summary="Common port addresses for IMAP, POP3 and their SSL
2469 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2470 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2471 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2472 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2473 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2476 <h2><a id="R13" name="R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call"
2479 <p>Non-fatal signals (such as timers set by fetchmail itself) can
2480 interrupt long-running functions and will then be reported as
2481 "Interrupted system call". These can sometimes be timeouts.</p>
2483 <h2><a id="R14" name="R14">R14. Since upgrading fetchmail/OpenSSL, I can no longer connect!</a></h2>
2485 <p>If the upgrade you did encompassed an upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0 or newer, you
2486 may need to run <code>c_rehash</code> on your certificate directories,
2487 particularly if you are using local certs directories (f. i. through fetchmail's <code>--sslcertpath</code> option).</p>
2489 <p>Reason: OpenSSL 1.0.0, relative to earlier versions, uses a different hash
2490 for the symbolic links (symlinks) in its <code>certs/</code> directory, so you
2491 need to recreate the symlinks by running <kbd>c_rehash
2492 /etc/ssl/certs</kbd> (adjust this to where your installation keeps its
2493 certificates), and you cannot easily share this certs directory with
2494 applications linked against older OpenSSL versions.</p>
2496 <p>Note: OpenSSL's <code>c_rehash</code> script is broken in several versions,
2497 which can cause malfunction if several OpenSSL tools versions are installed in
2498 parallel in separate directories. In such cases, you may need a workaround to
2499 get things going. Assuming your OpenSSL 1.0.0 is installed in
2500 <code>/opt/openssl1.0.0</code> and your certificates are in
2501 <code>/home/hans/certs</code>, you'd do this (the corresponding fetchmail
2502 option is <kbd>--sslcertpath /home/hans/certs</kbd> on the commandline and
2503 <kbd>sslcertpath /home/hans/cert</kbd> in the rcfile):</p>
2506 env PATH=/opt/openssl1.0.0/bin /opt/openssl1.0.0/bin/c_rehash /home/hans/certs
2509 <h2><a id="R15" name="R15">R15. Help, I'm getting Authorization failure!</a></h2>
2511 <p>Fetchmail by default attempts to authenticate using various schemes.
2512 Fetchmail tries these schemes in order of descending security, meaning
2513 the most secure schemes are tried first.</p>
2515 <p>However, sometimes the server offers a secure authentication scheme
2516 that is not properly configured, or an authentication scheme such as
2517 GSSAPI does requires credentials to be acquired externally. In some
2518 situations, fetchmail cannot know the scheme will fail without trying
2519 it. In most cases, fetchmail should proceed to the next authentication
2520 scheme automatically, but this sometimes does not work.</p>
2522 <p><strong>Solution:</strong> Configure the right authentication scheme
2523 explicitly, for instance, with <kbd>--auth cram-md5</kbd> or <kbd>--auth
2524 password</kbd> on the command line or <code>auth "cram-md5"</code> or
2525 <code>auth "password"</code> in the rcfile. Details can be found
2526 in the manual page.<br />
2527 <strong>Note</strong> that auth password should only be used
2528 across secure links (see the sslcertck and ssl/sslproto options).
2532 <h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
2533 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2536 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2537 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2538 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2540 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2543 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2544 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2547 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2550 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2551 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2552 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2553 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2555 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2558 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2560 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2562 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2570 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2573 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2577 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2580 <p>For more details consult the file
2581 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2583 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2586 <p>Symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2587 but hangs returning:</p>
2590 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2591 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2592 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2593 .......fetchmail: flushed
2594 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2595 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2598 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2601 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2605 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
2606 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2607 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2609 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2610 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2612 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2613 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2614 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2616 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2617 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2619 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2623 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2626 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2628 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2629 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2631 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2632 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2633 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2634 also truncates long lines at column 1024.)</p>
2636 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2637 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Better ones will restore it
2638 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2639 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2641 <p>Good servers are designed to restore the entire queue, including
2642 messages you have deleted. If you have one of these and it flakes out on
2643 you a lot, try setting a small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This
2644 will result in more IP connects to the server, but will mean it actually
2645 executes changes to the queue more often.</p>
2647 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2648 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2650 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2651 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2652 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2653 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2654 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2656 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2657 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2658 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2659 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2660 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2661 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2662 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2664 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2667 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org/">IMAP4</a>
2671 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems</h1>
2672 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2673 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2675 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2676 recipient names it parses out of Envelope-header lines (or these are
2677 improperly configured) as
2678 matching a name within the designated domains. To check this, run
2679 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2680 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2681 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2683 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of configuration
2686 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2687 necessary) and add enough '<code>aka</code>' declarations to cover all
2688 of your mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2689 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be uncollected if
2690 it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you don't have listed).</p>
2692 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2693 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2695 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2696 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2698 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2699 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2700 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2701 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2703 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2704 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2705 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2706 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2707 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2708 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2710 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2711 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2712 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2713 MAILBOXES on the man page, and check what is needed at <a
2714 href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/mail/multidrop">Matthias
2715 Andree's "Requisites for working multidrop
2716 mailboxes"</a>). If you want to try it, the way to do it is
2717 with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2719 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2722 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2723 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2725 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2726 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2727 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2728 multidrop routing.</p>
2730 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2732 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2733 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2734 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2735 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2737 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2738 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2739 that is useless for rerouting purposes. In this particular case, sell
2740 your ISP a clue. If that does not work, you may have to set
2741 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2742 bamboozled by this, but a missing envelope makes multidrop routing
2745 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2746 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2749 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2750 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2752 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2753 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2754 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2755 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2757 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2758 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2760 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2761 having DNS problems.</strike></a></h2>
2763 <p><em>The answer that used to be here no longer applies to
2766 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2767 message is processed.</a></h2>
2769 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2770 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2771 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2774 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2775 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2776 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2778 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2779 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2780 address is valid.</p>
2782 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2783 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2785 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2786 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2787 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2788 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2789 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2791 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2792 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2795 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2797 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2798 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2799 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2802 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2805 #############################################
2806 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2807 #############################################
2809 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2811 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2812 ---------------------------
2814 -------------------------
2815 # handle virtual users
2817 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2818 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2819 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2820 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2821 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2824 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2825 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2826 work. Michael says:</p>
2828 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2829 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2830 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2833 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2834 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2836 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2837 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2838 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2841 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2843 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2844 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2845 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2846 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2848 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2849 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2850 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2851 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2852 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2854 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2856 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2859 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2860 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2861 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2864 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2865 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2866 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2867 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2868 as an alias of your server.</p>
2870 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2873 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2874 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2875 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2876 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2877 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2879 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2880 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2881 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2882 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2883 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2884 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2887 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2888 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2889 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2890 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2893 <p>The real solution however is to make sure that fetchmail can find the
2894 envelope recipient properly, which will reliably prevent this message
2898 <h1>Mangled mail</h1>
2899 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2900 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2902 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2903 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2904 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2905 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2906 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2908 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2909 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2910 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2911 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2912 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as maildrop) and
2913 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2915 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2918 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2919 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2920 the server and choked on by an old version of
2921 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2923 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2924 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2925 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2926 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2928 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at the start of
2929 line are being split.</a></h2>
2931 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2932 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2933 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2936 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2937 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2938 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2939 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2941 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2942 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2943 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2946 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2947 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2948 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2949 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2950 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2951 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2952 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2953 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2955 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2956 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2959 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2962 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2963 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2964 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2965 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2967 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2968 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2969 different way</a></h2>
2971 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2972 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2973 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2974 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
2977 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
2978 order they pass your mail:</p>
2981 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
2983 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
2985 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
2987 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
2989 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2990 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
2993 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
2994 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
2995 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
2996 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
2997 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
2999 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
3000 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
3001 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
3004 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
3007 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
3008 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
3009 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
3010 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
3011 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
3012 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
3014 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
3015 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
3016 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
3017 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
3018 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
3020 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
3021 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
3022 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
3023 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
3024 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
3025 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
3026 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
3028 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
3029 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
3030 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
3031 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
3032 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
3033 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
3034 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
3035 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
3036 actual password.</p>
3038 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
3039 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
3040 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
3041 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
3042 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
3043 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
3044 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
3045 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
3046 operating system.</p>
3048 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
3049 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
3050 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
3051 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
3052 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
3053 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
3055 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3056 fetching too much!</strike></a></h2>
3058 <p><em>The information that used to be here pertained to fetchmail 4.4.7 or
3059 older, which should not be used. Use a recent fetchmail version.</em></p>
3061 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3062 or mangled.</a></h2>
3064 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3065 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3066 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3067 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3068 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3070 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3071 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3072 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3073 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3074 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3075 only effective solution.</p>
3077 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3078 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3079 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3082 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3083 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3084 you're having this problem. The <a
3085 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3088 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3089 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3092 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3093 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3094 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3095 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3098 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3099 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3100 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3101 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3102 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3103 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3104 generates different Boundary tags for each part, e.g. one tag is
3105 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3106 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3107 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3108 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3110 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3111 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3112 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3113 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3114 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3115 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3117 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3118 attachments is the <a
3119 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3121 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3122 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3123 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3124 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3125 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3128 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3129 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3130 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3131 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3134 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3139 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3140 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3141 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3142 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3144 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3147 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3148 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3152 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3153 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3154 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3155 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3156 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3157 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3158 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3159 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3160 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3161 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3162 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3163 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3164 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3166 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3169 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3171 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3173 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3175 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3176 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3178 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3180 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3183 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3184 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3185 internet interoperability.</p>
3187 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3188 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3189 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3190 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3191 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3192 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3193 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3194 mailtool's format.</p>
3196 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3199 <p>Fetchmail doesn't know anything about mail attachments and doesn't
3200 treat them any differently from plain message data.</p>
3202 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3203 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3204 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3205 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3206 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3207 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3208 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3209 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3211 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3212 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3213 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3214 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3215 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3216 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3218 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3221 <p>Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3222 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100 %.
3223 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3224 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3225 the message end.</p>
3227 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3228 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3231 <ol><li>Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3232 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3233 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</li>
3235 <li>The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3236 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3237 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3238 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3239 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3240 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3243 <li>Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3244 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3245 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3246 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3253 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p></li>
3255 <li>Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3256 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange goofs it up.</li>
3258 <li>As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3259 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3260 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</li>
3263 <p>There is no fix for this.</p>
3265 <h2><a id="X9" name="X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
3266 with Domino IMAP</a></h2>
3268 <p>Domino 6 IMAP was found by Anthony Kim in February 2006 to
3269 erroneously omit the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header in messages
3270 downloaded through IMAP, causing messages to display improperly. This
3271 happened with Domino's incoming mail format configured to "Prefers
3272 MIME". Solution: switch Domino to "Keep in Sender's format".</p>
3275 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2006-March/010015.html">Anthony
3279 <h2><a id="X10" name="X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial
3282 <p>Fetchmail is sometimes reported to deliver partial messages. This
3283 is usually related to network outages that occur while fetchmail is
3284 downloading a message body. In such cases, fetchmail has downloaded a
3285 complete header, so your header will be intact. The message body will be
3286 truncated, and fetchmail will later attempt to redownload the
3287 message (providing the server is standards conformant).</p>
3289 <p>The reason for the truncation is that fetchmail streams the body
3290 directly from the POP3/IMAP server into the SMTP/LMTP server or MDA (in
3291 order to save memory), so fetchmail has already written a part of the
3292 message before it notices it will be incomplete, and fetchmail cannot
3293 abort a transaction it has started, and it's unclear if it ever will be
3294 able to, because this is not standardized and the outcome will depend on
3295 the receiving software (be it SMTP/LMTP or MDA).</p>
3298 <h1>Other problems</h1>
3299 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3300 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3302 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3303 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3304 the log file, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts.
3305 To get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3306 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it already
3309 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message,
3310 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3312 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3313 which Mozilla and other clients don't do; the announcement of
3314 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3315 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3321 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3327 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3328 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3329 /etc/inetd.conf file and reload (or restart) inetd.</p>
3331 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3344 to solve the problem system-wide.
3346 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3347 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3349 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3350 your rc file and restart, reading it. Note that this causes troubles if
3351 you need to provide a password via the console, unless you're running in
3352 --nodetach mode.</p>
3354 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3355 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3357 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3358 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3359 fix this, but there is a workaround: use the --expunge option with a
3360 reasonably low figure that works for you. Try 10 for a start.</p>
3362 <p>IMAP is less susceptible to this problem, because the "deleted"
3363 message marks are persistent, but they aren't in POP3. Note that the
3364 --expunge default for IMAP is different than the default for POP3.</p>
3366 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3367 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3368 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3369 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3371 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3372 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3374 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3375 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3378 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3379 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3380 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3381 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3382 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3384 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3385 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3386 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3388 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3389 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3390 the log will look right.</p>
3392 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3393 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3395 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3396 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3398 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3399 to fail and time out. Check your <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>,
3400 <code>/etc/host.conf</code>, <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> (if you
3401 have the latter two) and you <code>/etc/hosts</code> files. Make sure
3402 your hostname and fully-qualified domain name are both in
3403 <code>/etc/hosts</code>, and that hosts is looked at before DNS is
3404 queried. You probably also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the
3407 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
3408 with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3410 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3411 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3412 Switching to a faster MTA like <a
3413 href="http://www.postfix.org/">Postfix</a> might help.</p>
3415 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3416 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3418 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3421 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3422 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3423 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3425 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3426 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3427 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3428 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3429 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3432 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3434 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3435 option working?</a></h2>
3437 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3438 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3439 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3440 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3441 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3442 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3443 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3444 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3446 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3447 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3449 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3450 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3451 turn one of them off - which one, depends on why they have been set in
3452 the first place, and to a lesser degree on the upstream server.</p>
3454 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3455 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3456 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3457 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3458 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3459 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3460 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3462 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my
3463 messages the same?</strike></a></h2>
3465 <p><em>The answer that used to be here made no sense and was dropped.</em></p>
3467 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3468 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3470 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.
3471 Because some servers like to drop the connection after that probe,
3472 fetchmail will re-poll immediately with this probe defeated.</p>
3474 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3475 get the message only once per run.</p>
3477 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3478 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3480 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3482 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3484 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3485 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3486 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3487 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3489 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3491 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3492 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3493 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3494 your local server is.</p>
3496 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>, which is not
3497 recommended though, as it may cause mail loss.</p>
3499 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3502 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3504 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3506 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3507 does something like "date >> $HOME/fetchmail.log".</p>
3509 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3512 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> (available since release 6.3.0) to
3513 delete oversized mails along with the <code>--limit</code> option. If
3514 you are already having <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete
3515 oversized mails, <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to
3516 avoid losing mails unintentionally.</p>
3518 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3519 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3520 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3521 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3522 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3523 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3524 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3526 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3529 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3530 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3531 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3532 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3533 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3534 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3539 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3540 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3541 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3542 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3543 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3544 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3547 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3548 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3549 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3550 with the data reset to initial values.
3554 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3555 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3556 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3557 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3559 <h2><a name="O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
3560 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter format?</a></h2>
3562 <p>All the world uses ISO-216:1975 "A4" paper except for North America.
3563 Using A4 format reaches far more people than (formerly known as DIN A4,
3564 from DIN 476) format. Besides that, A4 paper <em>is</em> available in North
3566 For further information on the Letter-vs-A4 story, see:</p>
3567 <ul><li><a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html">Markus
3568 Kuhn: "International standard paper sizes"</a></li>
3570 href="http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/">Brian
3571 Forte: "A4 vs US Letter"</a></li></ul>
3573 <p>Offering the document formatted for two different paper sizes would
3574 bloat the package beyond reason, and formatting in a way that fits A4
3575 and Letter paper formats would be a waste of paper in most parts of the
3576 world. For that reason, fetchmail only ships with an A4 formatted PDF
3579 <p>To create a letter-sized PDF, install <a
3580 href="http://www.htmldoc.org/">HTMLDOC</a>, edit
3581 <code>fetchmail-FAQ.book</code> in the source directory with your
3582 favorite text editor, replace <samp>--size A4</samp> by <samp>--size
3583 letter</samp>, and type:
3586 make fetchmail-FAQ.pdf
3589 <h2><a name="O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
3590 in MSG_PEEK."</a></h2>
3591 <p>That's in fact a bug in Linux kernels around the late 2.6.2X versions,
3592 rather than fetchmail. Fetchmail has no race bugs around MSG_PEEK,
3593 as of version 6.3.9. The message can safely be ignored.</p>
3596 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
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3605 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3606 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3607 Matthias Andree</address>