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13 <td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 2001/10/13 04:51:50 $
16 <H1>Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</H1>
18 <p>Before reporting any bug, please read <a href="#G3">G3</a> for advice
19 on how to include diagnostic information that will get your bug fixed
20 as quickly as possible.
22 <p>If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to
23 this FAQ list, mail it to fetchmail's maintainer, Eric S. Raymond, at
24 <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com">esr@thyrsus.com</A>.
26 <h1>General questions:</h1>
28 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br>
29 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br>
30 <a href="#G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br>
31 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br>
32 <a href="#G5">G5. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br>
33 <a href="#G6">G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br>
34 <a href="#G7">G7. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br>
35 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br>
36 <a href="#G9">G9. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br>
37 <a href="#G10">G10. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic
39 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br>
40 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br>
41 <a href="#G13">G13. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br>
42 <a href="#G14">G14. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br>
43 <a href="#G15">G15. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br>
45 <h1>Build-time problems:</h1>
47 <a href="#B1">B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</a><br>
48 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br>
49 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br>
51 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions:</h1>
53 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br>
54 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br>
55 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with `no'.</a><br>
56 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a `parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br>
58 <h1>Configuration questions:</h1>
60 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root on my own machine?</a><br>
61 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get killed when I log out?</a><br>
62 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?</a><br>
63 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam features?</a><br>
64 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less often than others?</a><br>
65 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not from an init script.</a><br>
66 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another host?.</a><br>
68 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs:</h1>
70 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br>
71 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br>
72 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br>
73 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br>
74 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br>
75 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br>
77 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers:</h1>
79 <a href="#S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a><br>
80 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br>
81 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br>
82 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br>
83 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br>
84 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br>
85 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br>
86 <a href="#S8">S8. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?</a><br>
87 <a href="#S9">S9. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br>
88 <a href="#S10">S10. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br>
89 <a href="#S11">S11. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br>
90 <a href="#S12">S12. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br>
91 <a href="#S13">S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br>
92 <a href="#S14">S14. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br>
94 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication methods:</h1>
96 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br>
97 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br>
98 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br>
99 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br>
100 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br>
102 <h1>Runtime fatal errors:</h1>
104 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed' messages.</a><br>
105 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.</a><br>
106 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc file.</a><br>
107 <a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.</a><br>
108 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.</a><br>
109 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br>
110 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br>
111 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade</a><br>
112 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
113 messages but before deleting them</a><br>
114 <a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br>
115 <a href="#R11">R11. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br>
117 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
119 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a><br>
120 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped connection.</a><br>
121 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br>
123 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems:</h1>
125 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a><br>
126 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local domain properly.</a><br>
127 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a><br>
128 <a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS problems.</a><br>
129 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is processed.</a><br>
130 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with majordomo?</a><br>
131 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses from
132 my Received headers as it should.</a><br>
133 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of messages.</a><br>
135 <h1>Mangled mail:</h1>
137 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.</a><br>
138 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject line.</a><br>
139 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.</a><br>
140 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different way.</a><br>
141 <a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too much!</a><br>
142 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or mangled.</a><br>
143 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging fetchmail.</a><br>
144 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my messages.</a><br>
146 <h1>Other problems:</h1>
148 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile doesn't exist.</a><br>
149 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header is
150 dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br>
151 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll cycle?</a><br>
152 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
153 a line hit while downloading?</a><br>
154 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From address?</a><br>
155 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a><br>
156 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted order?</a><br>
157 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option working?</a><br>
158 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same messages
159 over and over?</a><br>
160 <a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the same?</a><br>
164 <h2><a name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a></h2>
166 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval problem
167 for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an intermittent PPP or
168 SLIP connection to a remote mailserver. It can collect mail using any
169 variant of POP or IMAP and forwards via port 25 to the local SMTP
170 listener, enabling all the normal forwarding/filtering/aliasing
171 mechanisms that would apply to local mail or mail arriving via a
172 full-time TCP/IP connection.
174 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
175 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
176 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection up
177 to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
178 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
179 feature-rich, and well documented.
181 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
182 software. The openness of the sources is the strongest assurance of
183 quality you can have. Extensive peer review by a large,
184 multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as near
185 bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.
187 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
188 href="http://gnu.org//copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
191 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for fetchmail's
195 <h2><a name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail
198 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
199 sources at the fetchmail home page:
200 <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail">
201 http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail</a>. You can also usually find
203 href="http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.html">POP
204 mail tools directory on Sunsite</a>.
206 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
207 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it may
208 not be completely current.
211 <h2><a name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a></h2>
213 <p>Yes I will, provided you include enough diagnostic information for me
214 to go on. Send bugs to <a
215 href="mailto:fetchmail-friends@ccil.org">fetchmail-friends</a>. When reporting
216 bugs, please include the following:
219 <li>Your operating system.
220 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
221 name and origin ogf the RPM or other binary package you installed.
222 <li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.
223 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are forwarding to.
224 <li>Any command-line options you used.
225 <li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
226 command-line options you used.
229 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have any
230 suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message, please
231 include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.
233 <p>Often, the first thing I will do when you report a bug is tell you to
234 upgrade to the newest version of fetchmail, and then see if the
235 problem reproduces. So you'll probably save us both time if you
236 upgrade and test with the latest version <em>before</em> sending in a
239 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working when
240 you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
241 href="ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/fetchmail">intermediate versions of
242 fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
243 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the version
244 sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last good one
245 and the current one. If it works, the failure was introduced in the
246 upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the failure was introduced
247 in the lower half. Now bisect that half in the same way. In a very
248 few tries, you should be able to identify the exact adjacent pair
249 of versions between which your bug was introduced -- and with
250 information like that, I can usually come up with a fix very quickly.
252 <p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to test for
253 IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe function of
254 fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf doesn't tell you
255 it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak, poorly-designed
256 protocol with chronic problems, and the later versions after RFC1725
257 actually get worse rather than better. Changing over to IMAP4 may well
258 make your problem go away -- and if your ISP doesn't have IMAP4
259 support, bug them to supply it.
261 <p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not necessary
262 unless your symptom seems to involve an error in configuration
263 parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask the passwords
266 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look mangled
267 (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted in the
268 headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a href="#X1">X</a>
269 before submitting a bug report. Pay special attention to the item on
270 <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing mail mangling</a>. There are
271 lots of ways for other programs in the mail chain to screw up that
272 look like fetchmail's fault, but you may be able to fix these by
273 tweaking your configuration.
275 <p>A transcript of the failed session with -v -v (yes, that's
276 <em>two</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost always be useful.
277 It is very important that the transcript include your POP/IMAP server's
278 greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server problems. This
279 transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are specially masked
280 out precisely so the transcript can be passed around.
282 <p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should include
283 session transcripts with -v -v of both the working and failing
284 versions. Very often, the source of the problem can instantly
285 identified by looking at the differences in protocol transactions.
287 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is good to have.
288 (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running but hung process by
289 giving the process ID as a second argument.) You will need to
293 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
296 and then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be gdb-traced.
298 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce the
299 bug under the latest (current) version.
301 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed very quickly, often
302 within 48 hours. Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the
303 solution isn't obvious when I first look, it may evade me for a long
304 time (or to put it another way, fetchmail is well enough tested that the
305 easy bugs have long since been found). So if you want your bug fixed
306 rapidly, it is not just sufficient but nearly <em>necessary</em> that
307 you give me a way to reproduce it.
310 <h2><a name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a></h2>
312 Probably not. Most of the feature suggestions I get are for ways to
313 set various kinds of administrative policy or add more spam filtering
314 (the most common one, which I used to get about four million times a week
315 and got <em>really</em> tired of, is for tin-like kill files).
317 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on the
318 server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf domain
319 exclusions. You can do other policy things better with the
320 <CODE>mda</CODE> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
321 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
322 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.
324 <p>I'm not going to do these; fetchmail's job is transport, not policy, and I
325 refuse to change it from doing one thing well to attempting many things badly.
326 One of my objectives is to keep fetchmail simple so it stays reliable.
328 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested features
329 (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls from the
330 same instance of fetchmail) see the <a
331 href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/design-notes.html">design notes</a>.
333 <p>Fetchmail is a mature project, no longer in constant active
334 development. It is no longer my top project, and I am going to be
335 quite reluctant to add features that might either jeopardize its
336 stability or involve me in large amounts of coding.
338 <p>All that said, if you have a feature idea that really is about a transport
339 problem that can't be handled anywhere but fetchmail, lay it on me. I'm
340 very accommodating about good ideas.
343 <h2><a name="G5">G5. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a></h2>
345 <p>There is a fetchmail-friends list for people who want to discuss fixes
346 and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a MailMan
347 list, which you can sign up for at <a
348 <a href="http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-friends">fetchmail-friends@lists.ccil.org</a>.
349 There is also an announcements-only list, <a href="http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">fetchmail-announce@lists.ccil.org</a>.
352 <h2><a name="G6">G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
354 <p>The fetchmail development was also a sociological experiment, an
355 extended test to see if my theory about the critical features of the
356 Linux development model is correct.
358 <p>The experiment was a success. I wrote a paper about it titled <a
359 href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
360 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
361 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
362 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
363 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
364 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape tell me it helped
366 href="http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html"> give
367 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.
369 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the paper
370 on the Web with a search for that title.
373 <h2><a name="G7">G7. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a></h2>
375 <p>The short answer: IMAP 2000 running over Unix.
377 <p>Here's a longer answer:
379 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server that
380 conforms to the relevant RFCs (and even some outright broken ones like
381 <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a href="#S12">Novell
382 GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally well with all,
383 however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without LAST, limit
384 fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
387 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come with
388 POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken POP3
389 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing minority
390 also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by running fetchmail in
391 AUTO mode, or by using the `Probe for supported protocols' function in
392 the fetchmailconf utility).
394 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an IMAP4rev1
395 server; it has the best facilities for tracking message `seen' states.
396 It also recovers from interrupted connections more gracefully than
397 POP3, and enables some significant performance optimizations. The new
398 <a href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.tar.Z">IMAP 2000</a>
399 is particularly nice, as it supports CRAM-MD5 so you don't have to
400 ship your mail password over the net en clair (fetchmail autodetects
401 this capability). Older versions had support for GSSAPI giving a
404 <p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just plain
405 broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle the
406 sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even Microsoft
407 itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail service runs
408 over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John Kirch's excellent <a
409 href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white paper</a> on Unix
412 <p>Source for a high-quality supported implementation of POP is available
413 from the <a href="ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/">Eudora
414 FTP site</a>. Don't use 2.5, which has a rather restrictive license.
415 The 2.5.2 version appears to restore the open-source license of
419 <h2><a name="G8">G8. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a></h2>
421 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail transport
422 programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you use, and user
423 agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to how mail is
424 delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the popular Unix mail
425 agents -- <a href="http://www.myxa.com/old/elm.html">elm</a>, <a
426 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
427 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or <a
428 href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> -- will work fine with fetchmail.
430 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet plug
431 for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. My own personal mail
432 setup is sendmail plus fetchmail plus mutt. Mutt's interface is only
433 a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor elm, but its
434 excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it in a class by itself. You
435 won't need its built-in POP3 support, though; most of the mutt
436 developers will cheerfully admit that fetchmail's is better :-).
439 <h2><a name="G9">G9. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a></h2>
441 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this ranges
442 from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to useless.
444 <p>Most people use fetchmail over phone wires, which are hard to tap.
445 Anybody with the skill and resources to do this could get into your
446 server mailbox with much less effort by subverting the server host.
447 So if your provider setup is modem wires going straight into a service
448 box, you probably don't need to worry.
450 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
451 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
452 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
453 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a TCP/IP
454 packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
455 concentrator you dial in to and the mailserver host).
457 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password encryption
458 alone will really address your security exposure. If you think you
459 might be snooped between server and client, it's better to use
460 end-to-end encryption on your whole mail stream so none of it can be
461 read. One of the advantages of fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push
462 delivery is that you may be able to arrange this by using ssh(1); see
463 <a href="#K3">K3</a>.
465 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your mail
466 could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from wherever it
467 originated. For best security, agree with your correspondents to use
468 a tool such as <a href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GPG</a> (Gnu Privacy
469 Guard) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
471 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for you to
472 set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious cracker
473 from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your connection
474 continuously or crack root on the server in order to read it.
476 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
477 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the
478 response to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code>
479 to see these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
482 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, you'll have CRAM-MD5 support
483 built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest of this
486 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP. This is a
487 POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's autoprobe
488 facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If you see
489 something in the greeting line that looks like an
490 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand part,
491 that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in). You can
492 register a secret on the host (using <code>popauth(8)</code> or some
493 program like it). Specify the secret as your password in your
494 .fetchmailrc; it will be used to encrypt the current challenge, and
495 the encrypted form will be sent back the the server for
498 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require you
499 to set up some magic files in your home directory on your client
500 machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at all.
502 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
503 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server to
504 see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the greeting
505 line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility described
506 by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is present by looking
507 for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY response.
509 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can use
510 their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
511 href="#S3">S3</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
512 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.
514 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use one-time
515 passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the 2.2 version
516 of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig Metz</a>). To check
517 this, look for the string "otp-" in the greeting line. If you see it,
518 and your fetchmail was built with OPIE support compiled in (see the
519 distribution INSTALL file), fetchmail will detect it also. When using
520 OTP, you will specify a password but it will not be sent en clair.
522 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a name="cmetz">Craig
524 href="http://www.inner.net/pub/">http://www.inner.net/pub/</a>.<p>
525 These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP" because
526 there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail also uses
527 this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They better,
528 because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)
530 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
531 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.
534 <h2><a name="G10">G10. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
536 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
537 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO
538 address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname part.
539 Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but when you are
540 using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your machine's
541 fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).
543 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running in daemon
544 mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your client
545 machine had when it started up.
547 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation time)
548 doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result is that
549 your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses. More
550 frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent host
551 address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your mail
552 to the wrong machine!
554 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended hostname
555 to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
556 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name `localhost' will usually work; or
557 you can use the IP address itself).
559 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP address,
560 `<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set the gateway
561 device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will use. Such a
562 restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons, especially on
563 multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.
565 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code> option
566 when initially developing your poll configuration -- it's never
567 necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link working
568 first, observe the actual address range you see on connections, and
569 add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need one) later.
571 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP changes
572 your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect). You need
573 to have your own registered domain and a definite IP address
574 registered for that domain. The server needs to be configured to
575 accept mail for your domain but then queue it to forward to your
576 machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its queue for your
577 domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in that case.
579 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP address;
580 that's what it was designed for, and it provides capabilities very
581 similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are not yet widely
582 deployed, as of early 2001.
584 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other (non-fetchmail)
585 problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that some sites will
586 bounce your email because the hostname your giving them isn't real
587 (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse DNS on your
588 dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you need to hack
589 your sendmail so it masquerades as your host. Setting
595 in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set<p>
598 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
601 in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases, replace
602 <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your mailhost.)
603 See the <a href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail
604 FAQ</a> for more details.
607 <h2><a name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a></h2>
609 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
610 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about SOCKS,
611 and download the SOCKS software including server and client code, at
612 the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
615 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
619 <h2><a name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
621 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do I need
622 to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?
624 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
625 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
626 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
627 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while
628 the connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.
630 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on most
631 Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in the
632 outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
633 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
634 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.
637 <h2><a name="G13">G13. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
639 Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.<p>
641 Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit time_t
642 counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps aren't used
643 for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you aren't running
644 on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to lose.
647 <h2><a name="G14">G14. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></H2>
649 No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a protocol
650 gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected operation
651 requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very different problem.
654 <h2><a name="G15">G15. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a></h2>
656 Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
657 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822 header, and
658 that storage is freed when body processing begins. It is, accordingly,
659 quite economical in its use of memory.
661 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
662 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has changed
663 and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in normal
664 operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up to the
665 MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.
667 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on the POP
668 server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server. This is not
669 a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even by buying more
670 TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth but not necessarily
674 <h2><a name="B1">B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</a></h2>
676 The vendor-supplied make on FreeBSD systems can only be used within
677 FreeBSD's "scope", e.g. the ports collection. Type "gmake" to run GNU
678 make and better things will happen.
681 <h2><a name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
683 In the immortal words of Alan Cox the last time this came up: ``Take
684 the Solaris lex and stick it up the backside of a passing Sun
685 salesman, then install <a
686 href="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/non-gnu/flex/">flex</a> and use that. All
689 <p>I couldn't have put it better myself, and ain't going to try now.
691 <p>(The same problem has been reported under HP-UX v10.20 and IRIX)
694 <h2><a name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a></h2>
696 If you get errors resembling these
699 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto `__res_search'
700 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to`__dn_skipname'
701 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to`__dn_expand'
702 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to`__dn_expand'
703 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
706 then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your Makefile
707 once you have installed the `bind' package.
709 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like this:
712 rcfile_y.o: In function `yyparse':
713 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
714 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
715 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
716 rcfile_y.o: In function `yyerror':
717 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
718 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
719 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to `dcgettext__' follow
722 reconfigure with <tt>configure --with-included-gettext</tt>. This is
723 due to some brain-damage in the GNU internationalization libraries.
726 <h2><a name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no longer work?</a></h2>
728 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
730 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt> option to
731 a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.
733 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
735 <p>The `via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is gone.
736 Use the %h feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.
738 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
740 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed back to
741 <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be supported
742 through a few more point releases.
744 <p><h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
746 The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
747 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
748 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
749 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have RFC1734
750 support for the AUTH command.
752 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver, fetchmail
753 now first tries methods that don't require a password (GSSAPI,
754 KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your password
755 (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't support any of
756 those will it ship your password en clair.
758 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than `password'
759 will prevent from looking for a password in your <tt>.netrc</tt> file
760 or querying for it at startup time.<p>
762 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
764 In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
767 <p><h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
769 If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need to
770 make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for an SMTP
771 target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order to avoid
772 DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries to derive
773 the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at startup.
775 <p><h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
777 Just after the `<CODE>via</CODE>' option was introduced, I realized
778 that the interactions between the `<CODE>via</CODE>',
779 `<CODE>aka</CODE>', and `<CODE>localdomains</CODE>' options were out
780 of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so much so
781 that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users were being
782 unpleasantly surprised.
784 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it. The
785 redesign simplified the code and made the options more orthogonal, but
786 may have broken some complex multidrop configurations.
788 Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just after the
789 `<CODE>poll</CODE>' or `<CODE>skip</CODE>' keyword being still
790 interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even in the
791 presence of a `<CODE>via</CODE>' option, will break.
793 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations (such
794 as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV tickets) might
795 also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky that we can't be
796 sure. If you think this has happened to you, contact the maintainer.
798 <p><h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
800 The `<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to `<code>folder</code>'.
801 If you try to use the old keyword, the parser will utter a warning.
803 <p><h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
805 It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written in the
806 old popclient syntax without an explicit `<CODE>username</CODE>'
807 keyword leading the first user entry attached to a server entry.
809 This error can be triggered by having a user option such as `<CODE>keep</CODE>'
810 or `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' before the first explicit username. For
811 example, if you write
814 poll openmail protocol pop3
815 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
818 the `<CODE>keep</CODE>' option will generate an entire user entry with
819 the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking user).
821 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It complicated
822 the configuration file grammar and confused users.
824 <p><h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
826 The `<CODE>interface</CODE>', `<CODE>monitor</CODE>' and
827 `<CODE>batchlimit</CODE>' options changed after 2.8.
829 <p>They used to be global options with `<CODE>set</CODE>' syntax like the
830 batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server options, like
831 `<CODE>protocol</CODE>'.
833 <p>If you had something like
836 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
839 in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
840 `interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your `defaults'
843 <p>Do similarly for any `<CODE>monitor</CODE>' or `<CODE>batchlimit</CODE>' options.
846 <h2><a name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
848 Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes around it. :-)
850 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions treated any
851 all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when it was
852 expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's class.
854 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
855 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.
858 <h2><a name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with `no'.</a></h2>
860 See <a href="#F2">F2</a> You're caught in an unfortunate crack between
861 the newer-style syntax for negated options (`no keep', `no rewrite'
862 etc.) and the older style run-on syntax (`nokeep', `norewrite'
865 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes around your
869 <h2><a name="F4">F4. I'm getting a `parse error' message I don't understand.</a></h2>
871 The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a server
872 option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll probably
873 find that by moving one or more options closer to the `poll' keyword
874 you can eliminate the problem.
876 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
877 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the `defaults'
881 <h2><a name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
883 Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:
885 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as root
886 from a cron job, like this:
889 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
892 This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's home
893 directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
894 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
895 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory containing:
898 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
902 It won't work if the second line is just "<CODE>user itz</CODE>". This is silly.
904 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the `default local user' (i.e. the
905 uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases, and the
906 `default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They should.
910 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't much
911 like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The problem is
912 that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a local user `itz'
915 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if the remote
916 name matches a local one?" Well, there are two reasons.
918 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host declared
919 that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You lose.
921 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same person?
922 They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are unless
923 local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it (that is, the
924 server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc file.).
926 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking about
927 ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find that all the
928 alternatives to the present default are worse or unacceptably
929 more complicated or both.
932 <h2><a name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
934 The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
935 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
936 arrange for the command `fetchmail -q' to be called on logout. Under
937 bash, you can arrange this by putting `fetchmail -q' in the file
938 `~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute `~/.logout' on logout.
939 For other shells, consult your shell manual page.
941 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to arrange
942 if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the contrib
943 subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some shell code
944 you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout profiles that will
945 accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere <babydr@nwrain.net> for
948 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up and
949 ppp-down scripts of pppd.
952 <h2><a name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
954 This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and right
955 now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer BSDs). However,
956 here are some important rules of thumb that can help. If they don't
957 work, ask your local sysop or your Internet provider.
959 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your machine
960 only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost certainly by a
961 point to point modem connection to your provider's local subnet that's
962 pretty secure against snooping (unless someone can tap your phone or
963 the provider's local subnet!). Under these circumstances, specifying
964 an interface address is fairly pointless.
966 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
967 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
968 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
969 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
970 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
971 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
972 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
975 <p>To determine the device:
978 <li> If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably sl0.
979 <li> If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably ppp0.
980 <li> If you're using a direct connection over a local network such as
981 an ethernet, use the command `netstat -r' to look at your routing table.
982 Try to match your mailserver name to a destination entry; if you don't
983 see it in the first column, use the `default' entry. The device name
984 will be in the rightmost column.
987 To determine the address and netmask:
990 <li> If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably 10.0.2.15,
991 with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure slirp to present
992 other addresses, but that's the default.)
994 <li> If you have a static IP address, run `ifconfig <device>', where <device>
995 is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP address given after
996 "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your end of the link, and is
997 what you need. You won't need to specify a netmask.
999 <li> If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary randomly
1000 over some given range (that is, some number of the least significant bits
1001 change from connection to connection). You need to declare an address
1002 with the variable bits zero and a complementary netmask that sets
1006 To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose you're
1007 hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the dynamic
1008 address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1009 205.164.136.255. Then
1012 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1015 would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1016 (65536 addresses) you would use
1019 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1023 <h2><a name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1025 This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the version
1026 installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older version,
1027 upgrade to sendmail 8.9.
1029 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a database of
1030 filter rules. The human-readable form of the database is at
1031 <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1032 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.
1034 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1035 numbers as keys. For example,</P>
1037 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1038 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1041 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1042 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain), and
1043 any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be used to
1044 do other things as well; see the <a
1045 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti-spam.html">sendmail
1046 documentation</a> for details)</P>
1048 To actually set up the database, run
1051 makemap hash deny <deny
1055 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host and
1056 then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument. You
1057 can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is parsed,
1058 if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist, fetchmail will
1059 flush and delete it.
1061 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or <strong>any host
1062 you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into your reject file. You
1063 <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do this!!!
1066 <h2><a name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
1067 often than others?</a></h2>
1069 Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1070 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1071 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1072 minutes, use something like this:
1075 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1076 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1079 Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1080 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of every
1081 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled every 30
1085 <h2><a name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1087 Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an interactive
1088 login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root" when you are
1089 logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or set to "/" when the
1090 startup scripts are running. That means fetchmail at startup can't find
1093 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's -f
1094 option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the problem.
1097 <h2><a name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another host?</a></h2>
1099 To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running fetchmail
1100 on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpname</code> option.
1101 See the manual page for details.
1104 <h2><a name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a></h2>
1106 For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric Allman
1107 tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is included
1108 in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the <code>rewrite</code>
1111 <p>If your sendmail complains ``sendmail does not relay'', make sure
1112 your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code>
1113 so that sendmail recognizes `localhost' as a name of its host.
1115 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network, also
1116 ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in name_allow
1117 (usually in /etc/mail/)
1119 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1120 `FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail
1121 that fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1122 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.
1124 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't work with
1125 fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553 Local configuration
1126 error, hostname not recognized as local</code>". The problem is that
1127 fetchmail normally feeds sendmail with the client machine's host
1128 address in the MAIL FROM line. These sendmails think this means
1129 they're seeing the result of a mail loop and suppress the mail. You
1130 may be able to work around this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.
1132 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to your
1133 mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this rule:
1136 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1139 This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1140 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail sees
1141 it, and tell fetchmail which header it is. With this change,
1142 multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received header
1143 omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case when
1144 the message has multiple recipients). However it will still not
1145 distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that no bounce
1146 will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple users at
1147 your site. To fix even that problem, you might want to try the
1148 following hack, which is however untested and quite experimental:
1151 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1153 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1154 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1155 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1156 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1159 For both hacks, you have to declare `<CODE>envelope "Delivered-To:"</CODE>' on
1160 the fetchmail side, to put the virtual domain (e.g. `domain.com')
1161 with RELAY permission into your access file and to add a line
1162 reading `<CODE>domain.com local:local-pop-user</CODE>' for the first and
1163 `<CODE>domain.com mdrop:local-pop-user</CODE>' for the second hack to your
1166 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To header,
1167 sendmail will not add another. Further, editing sendmail.cf
1168 directly is not very comfortable. Solutions for both problems
1169 can be found in Peter `Rattacresh' Backes' `hybrid' patch against
1170 sendmail. Have a look at it, you can find it in the contrib
1173 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the contrib
1174 subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it attempts
1175 to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external script.
1178 <h2><a name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a></h2>
1180 Turn on the <CODE>forcecr</CODE> option; qmail's listener mode doesn't like
1181 header or message lines terminated with bare linefeeds.
1183 <p>(This information is thanks to Robert de Bath
1184 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)
1186 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package (see <a
1187 href="http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html">http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html</a>)
1188 then, providing the local hosts are also using qmail, it is possible
1189 to set up one fetchmail link to be reliably collect the mail for an
1192 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the `Delivered-To:' message
1193 header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local mailbox it puts
1194 the username and hostname of the envelope recipient on this line. The
1195 major reason for this is to prevent mail loops.
1197 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site the ISP-mailhost
1198 will have normally put that site in its `virtualhosts' control file so
1199 it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this site. This results
1200 in mail sent to 'username@userhost.userdom.dom.com' having a
1201 'Delivered-To:' line of the form:
1204 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.dom.com
1207 A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:
1210 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.dom.com
1213 The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1214 but a string matching the user host name is likely.
1216 <p>To use this line you must:
1219 <li>Ensure the option `envelope Delivered-To:' is in the fetchmail
1222 <li>Ensure you have a localdomains containing 'userdom.dom.com' or
1223 `userhost.dom.com' respectively.
1226 So far this reliably delivers messages to the correct machine of the
1227 local network, to deliver to the correct user the 'mbox-userstr-'
1228 prefix must be stripped off of the user name. This can be done by
1229 setting up an alias within the qmail MTA on each local machine.
1230 Simply create a dot-qmail file called '.qmail-mbox-userstr-default'
1231 in the alias directory (normally /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:
1234 | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"
1237 Note this <em>does</em> require a modern /bin/sh.
1239 <p>Peter Wilson adds:
1241 <p>``My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means that I
1242 need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is due to
1243 qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is handled by the
1244 file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or ~user/.qmail-default).''
1246 <p>Luca Olivetti adds:
1248 <p>If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up the
1249 alias mechanism described above, you can use the option `<code>qvirtual
1250 "mbox-userstr-"</code>' in your fetchmail config file to strip the prefix
1251 from the local user name.
1254 <h2><a name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a></h2>
1256 <p>If you have <CODE>rewrite</CODE> on:
1258 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO addresses
1259 you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully qualified
1260 hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully qualified
1261 RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept `localhost' as
1262 a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.
1264 <p>In exim.conf, add `localhost' to your local_domains declaration if it's not
1265 already present. For example, the author's site at thyrsus.com would
1266 have a line reading:
1269 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1272 If you have <CODE>rewrite</CODE> off:
1274 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your fetchmail
1275 don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path addresses,
1276 and fetchmail's <CODE>rewrite</CODE> option is off. The specific case
1277 where this has come up involves bounce messages generated by sendmail
1278 on your mailer host, which have the (un-canonicalized) origin address
1281 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <CODE>rewrite</CODE> option and
1282 have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path addresses with the
1283 mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This option is enabled by
1284 default, so it won't be off unless you turned it off.
1286 <p>If you must run with <CODE>rewrite</CODE> off, there is a switch in exim's
1287 configuration files that allows it to accept domainless MAIL FROM
1288 addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the line
1291 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1294 in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that this
1295 will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name attached
1296 to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname rather than
1297 that of the remote mail server).
1300 <h2><a name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a></h2>
1302 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may work
1303 fine out of the box.
1305 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1306 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an
1307 order other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1308 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1309 it is an smail `feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1312 <p>Very recent smail versions require an <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code>
1313 option in the smail config file. This overrides smail's check to see
1314 that the HELO address is actually that of the client machine, which
1315 is never going to be the case when fetchmail is in the picture.
1316 According to RFC1123 an SMTP listener <em>must</em> allow this
1317 mismatch, so smail's new behavior (introduced sometime between
1318 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.
1321 <h2><a name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a></h2>
1323 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1324 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard.
1326 href="http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">
1327 MMDF recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with
1328 fetchmail feeding MMDF.
1331 <h2><a name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a></h2>
1333 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should convert \n
1334 to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and correct-for-RFC822
1335 ones. Use `forcecr'.
1338 <h2><a name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a></h2>
1340 Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3 servers, and
1341 is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some problems which
1342 fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a href="#G7">IMAP</a> instead if at
1343 all possible. If you must talk to qpopper, here are some problems to
1346 <p><h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
1348 Tony Tang <a href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a>
1349 reports that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper
1350 2.5.3 under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to
1351 2.0.35. When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3,
1352 fetchmail will hang with a socket error.
1354 <p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of some
1355 problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission pattern is
1356 tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also displays the hang
1357 but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The problem can also be
1359 href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to qpopper
1362 <p><h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
1364 Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad interaction
1365 with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a href="#X5">X5</a>
1366 for details. The solution is to upgrade your fetchmail.
1369 <h2><a name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a></h2>
1371 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is so
1372 broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1373 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted --
1374 you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message, with
1375 no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any other
1376 RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.
1378 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable.
1380 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used with
1381 M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with the
1382 --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option value
1383 that looks like `user@domain': the part to the left of the @ will
1384 be passed as the username and the part to the right as the NTLM domain.
1386 <p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command does
1387 not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the sizes of
1388 the compressed versions in the exchange mail database (thanks to Arjan
1389 De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this problem).
1391 <p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
1392 features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1393 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1394 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1395 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1396 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the listener's
1397 configured length limit).
1399 <p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
1400 registry bit that can fix this breakage:
1403 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1404 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1407 This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard protocol.
1408 The bits defined are:
1412 <DD>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command
1414 <DD>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and arguments
1416 <DD>Enable the LAST command
1418 <DD>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1419 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)
1421 <DD>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands (protocol
1422 requires 40, but some user names may be longer than that).
1424 <DD>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.
1427 There's another one that may be useful to know about:
1430 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1431 System\Pop3 Performance
1436 <DD>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending directly
1437 from the database (should always be on)
1439 Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing commands)
1440 (should only be on if you are seeing the problems reported
1443 <DD>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been deleted.
1446 The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me admitted
1447 that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public knowledge base.
1449 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has as its
1450 symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias". Grant
1453 This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to figure
1454 out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually keeping
1455 track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1456 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your
1457 mailbox name from your username.
1459 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1460 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because
1461 their username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another
1462 inept, lame, almost criminally negligent design decision from
1463 our friends in Redmond.
1465 <p>You've got several options:
1469 Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1470 usernames and mailbox names are the same.
1472 Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your
1473 username explicitly to your mailbox name.
1476 <p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
1477 ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
1478 Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or
1481 <p>I'll provide the CD.
1484 <h2><a name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1486 First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1487 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1488 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail -V</code>;
1489 if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're good to go,
1490 otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources (see the INSTALL
1491 file in the source distribution for directions).<p>
1493 Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password. Add
1494 `@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like `user
1495 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1496 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1497 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1498 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1499 `@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it
1500 is RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1501 plain-text password handshake.
1503 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail will show
1504 your pass-phrase in Unicode!
1506 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an RPA and
1507 non-RPA configuration:
1510 # This version will use RPA
1511 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1512 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1513 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1515 # This version will not use RPA
1516 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1517 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1518 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1522 <h2><a name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1524 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1526 You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user from
1527 Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username consisting of your
1528 Demon user name followed by your account name, with an at-sign between
1531 <p>For example, to download email for the user <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>,
1532 you could use the following .fetchmailrc file:
1535 set postmaster "philh"
1536 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1537 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1540 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1542 Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All messages
1543 have a Received: header added when they enter the maildrop, like this:
1546 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1547 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1550 To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that 'mailstore' is
1551 the name of the host which accepted the mail, and let it know the
1552 hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The following example assumes
1553 that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk, and that you have also bought
1554 "mail forwarding" for the domain my-company.co.uk (in which case your
1555 MTA must also be configured to accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)
1558 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1559 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1560 user xyz is * fetchall
1563 The `fetchall' command ensures that all mail is downloaded. If you
1564 want to leave mail on the server use `uidl' and `keep'; Demon does not
1565 implement the obsolete `top' command, because SDPS combines messages
1566 residing on two separate punt clusters into a single POP3 maildrop.
1567 If you do use UIDL, be aware that the "user@host" form for fetching
1568 mail from a particular Demon host will confuse fetchmail's UIDL code;
1571 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than 30
1572 days old; see their <a
1573 href="http://www.demon.net/info/helpdesk/demon_products/mail/sdps-tech.shtml">
1574 POP3 page</a> for details.
1576 <p><h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1578 There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on Demon
1579 Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but the person
1580 who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful if Demon
1581 Internet ever changes mail transports.
1583 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the envelope of a
1584 message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports if compiled with the
1585 --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the first line of the fetchmail -V
1586 response will include the string "+SDPS".
1588 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1589 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1590 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To address.
1592 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1593 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy it
1594 may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.
1597 <h2><a name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a></h2>
1599 Enable `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>'. A user reports that the 2.2 version
1600 of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1601 `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1602 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1603 certainly a server bug.
1605 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998) don't
1606 handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the argument
1607 you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the message.
1608 Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order to avoid
1609 marking messages seen, but `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' forces it to use
1612 <p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's servers.
1613 They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding another
1617 <h2><a name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a></h2>
1619 No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions prior to
1620 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1621 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in the
1622 LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty habit
1623 of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and Resent-
1626 <p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to get a
1627 POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead. OpenMail's
1628 project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in 6.0.
1631 <h2><a name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1633 Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3 servers
1634 fail to include the first Received line of the message in the send to
1635 fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA interprets Received
1636 continuations as body lines and doesn't parse any of the following
1639 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "-mda" switch:
1641 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1643 Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.
1645 You should also consider using "fetchall" option because Geocities' servers
1646 sometimes think that the first 45 messages have already been read.
1648 <p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
1649 Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.
1652 <h2><a name="S8">S8. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?</a></h2>
1654 You can't, yet. But <a
1655 href="http://hawkins.emu.id.au/gotmail/">gotmail</a>
1656 might be what you need.
1659 <h2><a name="S9">S9. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1661 You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1662 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1663 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.
1665 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN as the
1666 only appropriate response.
1668 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1669 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1670 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be corrected.
1673 <h2><a name="S10">S10. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1675 The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as seen.
1676 This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it may end
1677 up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the <code>fetchall</code>
1678 flag to ensure that it's recovered on the next cycle.
1681 <h2><a name="S11">S11. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1683 The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a weird
1684 bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1685 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around this
1689 <h2><a name="S12">S12. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1691 You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see attachments.
1692 MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with attachments
1693 but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.
1695 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1696 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1697 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there is
1698 no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1699 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.
1702 <h2><a name="S13">S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1704 The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named GroupFoolish;
1705 it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably broken. Among
1706 other things, it doesn't include a required content length in its
1707 BODY[TEXT] response.
1709 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend voting
1710 with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you stick
1711 with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will probably pay
1712 for it with other problems.
1715 <h2><a name="S14">S14. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a></h2>
1717 You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see attachments.
1718 InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server; it reports the
1719 message length with attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or
1722 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing me that
1723 their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this problem. I don't
1724 have any reports one way or the other yet.
1727 <h2><a name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
1729 Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports linking
1730 with socks library. If you specify the value of this option as
1731 ``yes'', the configure script will try to find the Rconnect library
1732 and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a directory
1733 containing the Rconnect library.
1735 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may work
1736 better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.
1739 <h2><a name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a></h2>
1741 To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports IPv6, the "Basic
1742 Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
1743 This currently means that you need to have a BSD/OS or NetBSD system with
1744 the NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution or a Linux system with a 2.2 or
1745 later kernel and net-tools. It should not be hard to build fetchmail on
1746 other IPv6 implementations if you can port the inet6-apps kit.
1748 <p>To use fetchmail with networking security (read: IPsec), you need a system that
1749 supports IPsec, the API described in the "Network Security API for Sockets"
1750 (draft-metz-net-security-api-01.txt), and the inet6-apps kit. This currently
1751 means that you need to have a BSD/OS or NetBSD system with the NRL IPv6+IPsec
1752 software distribution. A Linux IPsec implementation supporting this API will
1753 probably appear in the coming months.
1755 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from: <a
1756 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp</a>
1759 <p>The inet6-apps kit can be obtained from <a href="http://ftp.ps.pl/pub/linux/IPv6/inet6-apps/">http://ftp.ps.pl/pub/linux/IPv6/inet6-apps/</a>.
1761 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained from:
1764 <a href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
1765 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a>
1767 <a href="http://www.ipv6.inner.net/ipv6">http://www.ipv6.inner.net/ipv6</a>
1770 <a href="http://www.inner.net/ipv6">http://www.inner.net/ipv6</a> (via IPv4)
1774 <h2><a name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a></h2>
1776 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with IMAP:
1779 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
1782 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
1783 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells fetchmail
1784 that instead of opening a connection on the server's port 143 and
1785 doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to the server
1786 and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication (as well as
1787 getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons will detect
1788 that they've been called from the command line and assume the
1789 connection is peauthenticated.
1791 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
1792 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
1793 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that shouldn't
1797 <h2><a name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
1799 Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely identify you
1800 to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos V credentials
1801 with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable IMAP server.
1802 UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
1803 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
1804 is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for other
1805 reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and it has
1806 to have GSS support compiled in.
1808 <p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by default,
1809 since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V distribution
1810 (available via FTP at <a
1811 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
1812 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
1813 <pre>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</pre> option to configure. For
1814 instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries installed under
1815 /usr/krb5 so I run <pre>configure --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</pre>
1817 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this FAQ
1818 (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
1819 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html"> How to Kerberize your
1820 site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a credential for
1821 imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server (IMAP doesn't just
1822 use the host key). Then you'll need to have your credentials ready on
1823 your machine (cf. kinit).
1825 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss in your
1826 .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't need one. You
1827 can specify a username if you want, but this is only useful if your mailbox
1828 belongs to a username different from your Kerberos principal.
1830 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in cleartext in
1831 your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.
1834 <h2><a name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a></h2>
1836 You'll need to have the <a href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a>
1837 libraries installed. Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the
1838 OpenSSL libraries installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl)
1839 this will suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default
1840 location, you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after
1843 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
1844 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
1845 SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver
1846 to use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
1847 of care on the limited security provided.
1849 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains "PRNG
1850 not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This means that
1851 the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to locate a source
1852 of random bits from which to seed its random-number generator;
1853 normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and this message
1854 probably means your OS doesn't have that device.<p>.
1856 An interactive program could seed the random number generator from
1857 keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because fetchmail
1858 is primarily designed to run forever as a background daemon, that option
1859 option is not available in this case.
1862 <h2><a name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
1864 Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25 listener
1865 is down or inaccessible.
1867 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your smtp
1868 host (which is normally `localhost' unless you've specified an smtp
1869 option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a greeting
1870 line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible or the listener
1871 is down, fix that first.
1873 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.9, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
1874 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
1875 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".
1877 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the most
1878 benign and typical problem is that the listener had a momentary seizure
1879 due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was polling it -- process
1880 table full or some other problem that stopped the listener process
1881 from forking. If your SMTP host is not `localhost' or something else
1882 in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch could also have been caused by
1883 transient nameserver failure.
1885 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of these
1886 kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups, because a
1887 future fetchmail run will get the mail through.
1889 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying to
1890 connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to work
1891 around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this only
1892 attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing problem. You
1893 should really try to figure out what's going on underneath before it
1894 bites you some other way.
1896 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes solve
1897 such problems by doing an <CODE>smtp</CODE> declaration with an IP
1898 address that your routing table maps to something other than the
1899 loopback device (he used ppp0).
1901 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
1902 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more than
1905 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't
1906 looking at <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5,
1907 look at <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like
1913 so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
1914 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file. Make
1915 sure it says something like
1921 again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen first.
1923 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname does
1924 not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port 25 and
1925 even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts, but
1926 fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter what you
1929 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who solved his SMTP
1930 connection problem by removing the reference to -lresolv from his link
1931 line and relinking. Apparently in some older Linux distributions the
1932 libc bind library version works better.
1934 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind library is
1935 linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it won't be, and
1936 this particular cause should go away.
1939 <h2><a name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
1941 (I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)
1943 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
1944 command-line options `<CODE>-k -m cat</CODE>'. This will dump exactly what
1945 fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the Received line
1946 fetchmail itself adds to the headers).
1948 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
1949 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
1950 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
1954 <h2><a name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc file.</a></h2>
1956 This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been known
1957 to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of <code>flex</code>
1958 installed. The problem appears to be a result of building with an
1959 archaic version of lex.
1961 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.
1963 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
1964 href="ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/~ftp/pub/gnu">flex</a> from the Free
1965 Software Foundation. An FSF <a
1966 href="http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/order/ftp.html">mirror site</a>
1967 will help you get it faster.
1970 <h2><a name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
1972 We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and gcc-2.7.2.
1973 It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier versions.
1975 <p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library malloc.
1977 <p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
1978 version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
1979 calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
1980 Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
1981 calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself, not the
1982 fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an fclose called
1983 directly by fetchmail, either).
1986 <h2><a name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.</a><br></h2>
1988 We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
1989 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
1990 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
1991 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
1994 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with the code
1995 in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon fetchmail. The isolated
1996 Linux case has been chased down to a failure in dup(2) that may reflect a
1999 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an ampersand
2000 to background it. A Sun user recommends this:
2003 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2006 The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that the process
2007 detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is started and dies
2008 immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it child of PID 1). This is
2009 important when you start fetchmail interactively and than quit
2010 interactive shell. The line above makes sure fetchmail lives after
2014 <h2><a name="R6">R6. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a></h2>
2016 Your problem may be with pppd's `demand' option. We have a report that
2017 fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with pppd if `demand'
2018 is turned off. We have no idea why this is.
2021 <h2><a name="R7">R7. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a></h2>
2023 Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2024 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your PPP
2025 options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here are
2026 option values that work:
2033 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling a
2034 virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to different
2035 actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on different poll
2036 cycles. To work around this, change the poll name either to the real
2037 name of one of the servers in the ring or to a corresponding IP
2041 <h2><a name="R8">R8. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2043 In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment changed
2044 from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move your
2045 .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the file.
2046 (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian systems.)
2049 <h2><a name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
2050 messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2052 There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly other
2053 recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel writes:
2056 TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's now the
2057 default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment.
2058 When the tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460,
2059 and then fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because
2060 is is not allowing for the timestamp.
2062 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time (typically 2
2063 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next (fragmented)
2064 packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the fragmentation and
2065 restores normal behaviour. To do this, [execute]
2067 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps
2069 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At least
2070 [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue blocking.
2074 <h2><a name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a></h2>
2076 This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR" command will
2077 cause the server to start sending large amounts of data, which means
2078 large packets. If your networking layer has a packet-fragmentation
2079 problem, that's where you'll see it.
2082 <h2><a name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2084 Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten about. You
2085 should probably remove it.
2087 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as root
2088 without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2089 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.
2091 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail -v
2092 and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.
2095 <h2><a name="R11">R11. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a></h2>
2097 This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your MDA is
2098 croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove the
2099 <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP listener.
2102 <h2><a name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped connection.</a></h2>
2104 One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports itself as
2105 POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005 fixed that.
2106 If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It also truncates
2107 long lines at column 1024)
2109 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the whole
2110 mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it right
2111 away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right away, cross
2112 your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.
2114 <p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to restore
2115 the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If you have
2116 one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a small
2117 <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP connects
2118 to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes to the queue
2121 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better behaved.
2122 If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all DELE commands as
2123 though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical violation of
2124 the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky phone lines). Then it
2125 will re-queue any message that was being downloaded at hangup time.
2126 Still, qpopper may require a noticeable amount of time to do deletions
2127 and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail waits a bit before retrying in
2128 order to avoid a `lock busy' error.)
2131 <h2><a name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2133 Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when either
2134 (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2135 listener, or (b) it gets an error 571 (the spam-filter error) from the
2136 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.
2138 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2139 command marks a message `seen' as soon as the fetch command to get it
2140 is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually delivered
2141 (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25 listener
2142 can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the delivery in
2143 mid-message) that `seen' message can lurk invisibly in your server
2146 <p>Workaround: add the `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' keyword to your fetch options.
2148 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a> server.
2151 <h2><a name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
2152 mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2154 Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2155 recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
2156 matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
2157 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot of
2158 messages with the format ``line rejected, %s is not an alias of the
2159 mailserver'' or ``no address matches; forwarding to %s.''
2161 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration problem
2162 either on the server or your client machine.
2164 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a `<CODE>via</CODE>' option (if
2165 necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
2166 mailserver's aliases, then say `<CODE>no dns</CODE>'. This will take
2167 DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be uncollected if
2168 it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you don't have
2171 <p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can hurt
2172 you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
2173 intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the net.
2175 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing problem
2176 described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.
2179 <h2><a name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2181 A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's internetwork
2182 mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole domain in a single
2183 server mailbox and then routing based on what's in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.
2185 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter to
2186 just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use fetchmail's
2187 ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically (of course, this means
2188 you have to poll more frequently than the mailserver's expiration period).
2189 If you can't arrange this, try setting up a UUCP feed.
2191 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode may do
2192 (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing list
2193 software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2194 MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
2195 is with the `<CODE>localdomains</CODE>' option.
2197 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two other
2200 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to invoke multidrop mode.</strong>
2202 <p>Many people set a `<CODE>localdomains</CODE>' list and then forget
2203 that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the wildcard `*')
2204 in a `<CODE>here</CODE>' list before it will do multidrop routing.
2206 <p><strong>2. You may have to set `no envelope'.</strong>
2208 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address from a message
2209 before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it to avoid losing to mailing
2210 list software that doesn't put a recipient address in the To lines).
2212 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single server
2213 mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address that is
2214 useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set `<CODE>no
2215 envelope</CODE>' to prevent fetchmail from being bamboozled by this.
2217 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do multidrop
2218 delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider) is using qmail.
2221 <h2><a name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2223 This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the list
2224 expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver (that is, not on
2225 the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just chop the host part off any
2226 local addresses in the list.
2228 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2229 <CODE>sendmail -bv</CODE>.
2232 <h2><a name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS problems.</a></h2>
2234 <p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
2235 href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the reference
2236 to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some
2237 older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version works
2240 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind library
2241 is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it won't be,
2242 and this problem should go away.
2245 <h2><a name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is processed.</a></h2>
2247 <p>Use the `<CODE>aka</CODE>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2248 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2249 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check it.
2251 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS names,
2252 you can use the `<CODE>no dns</CODE>' option to prevent other hostname
2253 parts from being looked up at all.
2255 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to call DNS
2256 on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the address is valid.
2259 <h2><a name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with majordomo?</a></h2>
2261 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the majordomo
2262 alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that the mail it
2263 receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user name. A normal
2264 virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the default mailbox,
2265 rather than expansion through majordomo.
2267 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for dealing
2268 with this case that pairs a run control file like this:
2271 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2273 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2274 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2275 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2278 with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:
2281 #############################################
2282 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2283 #############################################
2285 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2287 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2288 ---------------------------
2290 -------------------------
2291 # handle virtual users
2293 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2294 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2295 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2296 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2297 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2300 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses of incoming
2301 mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to work. Michael
2305 I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the default ISP
2306 user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts + majordomo on my
2307 inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail 8.83
2311 <h2><a name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses from
2312 my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2314 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2315 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2316 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2319 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2321 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2322 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2323 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2324 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.
2326 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra Received
2327 lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the optional
2328 skip prefix argument of the `envelope' option; you may need to say
2329 something like `<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or `<code>envelope 2
2332 <h3>The `by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2334 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like
2337 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2338 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2339 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2342 it checks to see if `iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your mailserver
2343 before accepting `ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope address. This
2344 check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or if you were using `no dns'
2345 and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net as an alias of your server.
2348 <h2><a name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of messages.</a></h2>
2350 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you have
2351 N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2352 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box. Since
2353 they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail delivers N
2354 copies to each user.
2356 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2357 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2358 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2359 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the case,
2360 but the latter condition sometimes fails in a timing-dependent way if
2361 the server was processing multiple incoming mail streams.
2363 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all message-IDs
2364 received during a poll so far and dropping any message that matches a
2365 seen mail ID. The touble is that this is an O(N**2) operation that
2366 might significantly slow down the retriweval of large mail batches.
2369 <h2><a name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2371 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2372 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2373 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2374 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local delivery) is
2375 failing to recognize it as a header.
2377 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is installing
2378 a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't work, try to
2379 figure out which other program in your mail path is inserting the
2380 blank line and replace that. If you can't do either of these things,
2381 pick a different MDA (such as procmail) and declare it with the
2382 `<CODE>mda</CODE>' option.
2385 <h2><a name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject line.</a></h2>
2387 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2388 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2389 the server and choked on by an old version of <em>deliver</em>).
2391 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't process
2392 X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can suggest is
2393 replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not RFC822 conformant.
2396 <h2><a name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.</a></h2>
2398 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox, then this
2399 is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side SMTP listener or
2400 your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split messages.
2402 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split messages on
2403 From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of the BSD popper
2404 program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and elsewhere) is broken this way.
2406 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of `cat' and send yourself one
2407 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2408 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2411 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages either.
2412 What's probably happening is either sendmail's local delivery agent or
2413 your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant and are breaking
2414 messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From headers. You can
2415 figure out which by looking at your client-side mailbox with vi or
2416 more. If the message is already split in your mailbox, your local
2417 delivery agent is the problem. If it's not, your mailreader is the
2420 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2421 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like
2424 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2427 describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the `E' option in the
2428 flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail turn each dangerous
2429 start-of-line From into a >From, preventing programs further downstream
2433 <h2><a name="X4">X4.</a><a name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and different way</a></h2>
2435 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing the
2436 mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail that are
2437 actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so please go through
2438 this diagnostic sequence before sending us a complaint.
2440 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the order
2441 they pass your mail:
2444 <li> Programs upstream of your server mailbox.
2445 <li> The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.
2446 <li> The fetchmail program itself.
2447 <li> Your local sendmail.
2448 <li> Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2449 specified by <code>mda</CODE>.
2452 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it exposes
2453 pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your downstream
2454 software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need to pin down
2455 exactly where the message is being garbled in order to deduce what is
2458 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and retrieve it
2459 with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or by running with
2460 the equivalent command-line options):
2463 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2466 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except for (a)
2467 the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b) header address
2468 changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any end-of-line changes
2469 due to the <code>forcecr</code> and <code>stripcr</code> options.
2470 MBOX will in fact contain what programs downstream of fetchmail
2473 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and misconfigurations in
2474 those downstream programs. If MBOX looks unmangled, you will know
2475 that is what is going on and that it is not fetchmail's problem. Take
2476 a look at the other FAQ items in this section for possible clues about
2477 how to fix your problem.
2479 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with your
2480 actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
2481 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
2482 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server mailbox
2483 are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you can do about
2484 this aside from complaining to your site postmaster, and nothing at
2485 all fetchmail can do about it!
2487 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that case
2488 either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling. To
2489 determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and simulate
2490 a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard (both POP3
2491 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols) but requires
2492 some attention to detail. You should be able to use a fetchmail -v
2493 log as a model for a session, but remember that the "*" in your LOGIN
2494 or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your actual password.
2496 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
2497 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then your
2498 server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
2499 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
2500 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send
2501 us a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
2502 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
2503 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
2506 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
2507 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
2508 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
2509 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
2510 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry on
2511 <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.
2514 <h2><a name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too much!</a></h2>
2516 <p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before 4.4.8.
2517 Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than RETR, in order
2518 to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen is helpful for
2519 later recovery if you lose your connection in the middle of a
2522 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad interaction
2523 with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP bounds check was
2524 fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP argument. Decrementing the
2525 TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.
2527 <p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.
2529 <p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
2530 this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.
2533 <h2><a name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or mangled.</a></h2>
2535 <p>This isn't fetchmail's doing -- fetchmail never drops lines in message
2536 bodies or attachments. It may be your POP server, or it may be the
2537 sender's mail user agent (or a bad combination of both).
2539 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP servers
2540 are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading messages.
2541 We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
2542 Outlook servers. Windows- and NT-based POP servers seem especially
2543 prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one of these,
2544 replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the only
2547 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
2548 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
2549 headers introducing type application/pdf, mangling the type
2550 to application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types
2553 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
2554 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino 5.0.2b).
2555 It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape Messenger and
2556 other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole message. When
2557 fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH RFC822.TEXT to get first
2558 the header and then the body, Domino generates different Boundary tags
2559 for each part, .e.g. one tag is declared in the Content-type header and
2560 another is used to separate the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't
2561 work. (I have heard a rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed
2562 in Domino release 6; you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)
2564 <p>Another rich source of attachment problems is Microsoft Exchange and
2565 Microsoft Outlook. If you see unreadable attachments with a
2566 ContentType of "application/x-tnef", you're having this problem. The
2567 <a href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility
2570 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail user
2571 agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big offender is Sun
2572 MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough like MIME that some
2573 programs could get confused; these are generated by the mailtool and
2574 dtmail programs (the mail programs in Sun's OpenWindows and CDE
2577 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME attachments is
2578 the <a href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
2580 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
2581 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for
2582 converting character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment
2583 formats. At this writing, emil does not appear to have been
2584 maintained since a patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is
2587 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
2588 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
2589 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be able
2590 to fix the problem, in which case the message is unchanged.
2592 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using emil
2597 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
2598 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
2599 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
2600 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
2602 LOG="Converting $MATCH
2605 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
2606 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
2610 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail that if
2611 any one of the four listed expressions is found in the message, the
2612 total condition is considered true, and the message gets passed into
2613 emil. These four subconditions check whether the message has a Sun
2614 attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded attachment; there are
2615 others that could be added to check these things better and to check
2616 other relevant conditions. The "LOG=" line writes a line into the
2617 procmail log; the lone double-quote beginning the following line makes
2618 sure the log entry gets an end-of-line character. The call to gawk
2619 (GNU awk) is for fixing end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes
2620 leaves those in the format of the originating machine; it could
2621 probably be replaced with a sed subsitution.
2623 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:
2626 <li> BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments
2627 <li> Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)
2628 <li> Base64 Encoding for binary attachments
2629 <li> iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
2630 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)
2631 <li> Quoted-Printable encoding for headers
2632 <li> MIME attachment format
2635 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set and the
2636 Apple binary format) are as they should be for good internet
2637 interoperability.<p>
2639 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
2640 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
2641 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
2642 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending attachments
2643 (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the world doesn't
2644 understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be used at all),
2645 and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than mailtool's format.
2648 <h2><a name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging fetchmail.</a></h2>
2650 <p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know anything
2651 about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any differently from
2654 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your network
2655 transport layer's capability to handle the very large TCP/IP packets
2656 that attachments tend to turn into. You can test this theory by trying to
2657 download the offending message through a webmail account; using HTTP
2658 for the message tends to simulate large-packet stress rather well, and
2659 you will probably find that the messages that seem to be choking
2660 fetchmail will make your HTTP download speed drop to zero.
2662 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the packet-reassembly
2663 layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't manifest at normal
2664 packet sizes. It may also be caused by malfunctioning path-MTU
2665 discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's a modem in the link,
2666 it may be because the attachment contains the Hayes mode escape "+++".
2669 <h2><a name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my messages.</a></h2>
2671 <p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
2672 Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
2673 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%. Most
2674 of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an SMTP
2675 server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at message end.
2677 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange mail
2678 server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what happens:
2680 <p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the message
2681 contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with, e.g.
2684 <p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes the
2685 end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing, which
2686 is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as part of the
2687 email body, Interchange throws out the whole "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves
2688 the email body without any line terminator at the end of it. RFC821
2689 does not forbid this, though it probably should.
2691 <p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message. IMAP
2692 returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to the
2693 protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because the
2694 message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client sees:
2698 where the ')' is from IMAP.
2700 <p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
2701 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.
2703 <p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts it
2704 at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity on,
2705 you'll get a message about actual != expected.
2707 <p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
2708 href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.
2711 <h2><a name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
2713 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice for
2714 system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing the log,
2715 without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To get around
2716 it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail (this will have
2717 no effect on the contents of the logfile if it already exists).
2720 <h2><a name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
2721 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
2723 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery, which
2724 Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of new messages
2725 is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should be a ``biff''
2726 command to control this. Type
2732 to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command
2738 which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
2739 doesn't work, comment out any reference to ``comsat'' in your
2740 /etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.
2742 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile is
2754 to solve the problem system-wide.
2757 <h2><a name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll cycle?</a></h2>
2759 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify your rc
2760 file and restart, reading it.
2763 <h2><a name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
2764 a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
2766 <p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an IMAP
2767 with a long expunge interval.
2769 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed until
2770 you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot fix this,
2771 because doing it right takes cooperation from the server. There are
2772 two possible remedies:
2774 <p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
2775 the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
2776 doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as well
2777 as on processing a QUIT command.
2779 <p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
2780 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
2781 command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages immediately
2782 after they are downloaded.
2784 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
2785 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
2786 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
2787 the next time you complete a successful query.
2790 <h2><a name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
2792 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the sending
2793 SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that address.
2795 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL FROM
2796 address naming a different host than the originating site for your
2797 connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to help
2798 prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site. (RFC 1123
2799 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)
2801 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
2802 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf on
2803 any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!
2805 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall back to
2806 the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky, the log
2810 <h2><a name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
2812 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and also each
2813 time it gets a HELO in listener mode.
2815 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups to
2816 fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
2817 <code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
2818 fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>, and
2819 that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably also want
2820 your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.
2822 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
2823 with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.
2825 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may help,
2826 and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well. Switching to
2827 a faster MTA like qmail or exim might help.
2830 <h2><a name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted order?</a></h2>
2832 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail in.
2834 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the order
2835 that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything about
2836 this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.
2838 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to sort
2839 messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics of
2840 fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and transparent a
2841 pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather than emphasize, the
2842 differences between the remote-fetch protocols it uses.
2844 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.
2847 <h2><a name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option working?</a></h2>
2849 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse fetchmail.
2850 If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd has an idle
2851 timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
2852 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
2853 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that fetchmail
2854 relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its own delay
2855 interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever reaching its
2859 <h2><a name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same messages
2860 over and over?</a></h2>
2862 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the <cite>keep</cite>
2863 and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have, turn <cite>keep</cite> off.
2865 <p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL feature
2866 that can lead to all your old messages being seen again after a line
2867 drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL code breaks
2868 worse every time I touch it. The problem is fundamental; maintaining
2869 and garbage-collecting the right kind of client-side state is just
2870 hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and removed LAST should be hung
2871 up by his thumbs and whipped with scorpions. The right answers are
2872 either (a) live with the occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4,
2873 or (c) fix the code yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose
2874 (c), I don't want to hear about it.
2876 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to your
2877 mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and many,
2878 especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your fetchmail is
2879 able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox is write-locked
2880 by the other instance yours can neither mark messages seen or delete them.
2881 The solution is to either (a) wait for the other client to finish, or (b)
2884 <p>James Stevens <James.Stevens@kyzo.com> writes:<p>
2887 <p>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from an NT POP3
2888 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting each e-mail
2889 one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very unreliable and
2890 would often just drop out in the middle of a session.
2892 <p>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated normally
2893 (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll back all the
2896 <p>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just end up
2897 continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or, if the
2898 queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
2899 connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back any
2900 deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the first few
2901 e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became fuller and fuller
2902 the chances of getting a connection long enough to collect theentire
2903 mailbox became smaller and smaller.
2905 <p>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5 or 10)
2906 e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3 connection is
2907 terminated correctly.
2910 <p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
2911 to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
2912 switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.
2915 <h2><a name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the same?</a></h2>
2917 This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking the received
2918 date from the last Received header.<p>
2921 <table width="100%" cellpadding=0><tr>
2922 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home Page</a>
2923 <td width="30%" align=center>To <a href="/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
2924 <td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 2001/10/13 04:51:50 $
2927 <ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>
2932 compile-command: "(cd ~/WWW; upload fetchmail/fetchmail-FAQ.html)"