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17 <title>The Fetchmail FAQ</title>
18 <meta name="description"
19 content="Frequently asked questions about fetchmail."/>
20 <meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, POP, POP2, POP3, IMAP, remote mail"/>
23 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
25 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
27 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
32 <h1 id="FAQ">Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</h1>
34 <p>Before reporting any bug, please read <a href="#G3">G3</a> for
35 advice on how to include diagnostic information that will get your
36 bug fixed as quickly as possible.</p>
38 <p>Note that this FAQ is occasionally updated from the SVN repository
39 and speaks in the past tense ("since") about a fetchmail release that is
40 not yet available. Please try a release candidate for that version in
41 case you need the new option.</p>
43 <p>If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to
44 this FAQ list, file it to one of the trackers at <a
45 href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">our BerliOS
46 project site</a> or post to one of the fetchmail mailing lists (see
49 <h1 id="Contents">Contents</h1>
51 <a href="#Contentdetail">Detailed Contents</a><br/>
52 <a href="#C_G">G. General problems</a><br/>
53 <a href="#C_B">B. Build-time problems</a><br/>
54 <a href="#C_F">F. Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</a><br/>
55 <a href="#C_C">C. Configuration questions</a><br/>
56 <a href="#C_T">T. How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</a><br/>
57 <a href="#C_S">S. How to make fetchmail work with various servers</a><br/>
58 <a href="#C_I">I. How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</a><br/>
59 <a href="#C_K">K. How to set up well-known security and authentication</a><br/>
60 <a href="#C_R">R. Runtime fatal errors</a><br/>
61 <a href="#C_H">H. Hangs and lockups</a><br/>
62 <a href="#C_D">D. Disappearing mail</a><br/>
63 <a href="#C_M">M. Multidrop-mode problems</a><br/>
64 <a href="#C_X">X. Mangled mail</a><br/>
65 <a href="#C_O">O. Other problems</a><br/>
67 <h1 id="Contentdetail">Detailed Contents</h1>
69 <h2 id="C_G">General problems</h2>
71 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br/>
72 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br/>
73 <a href="#G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
74 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br/>
75 <a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like Outlook Express.</a><br/>
76 <a href="#G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br/>
77 <a href="#G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br/>
78 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
79 <a href="#G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
80 <a href="#G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br/>
81 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a><br/>
82 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br/>
83 <a href="#G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br/>
84 <a href="#G14">G14. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br/>
85 <a href="#G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br/>
86 <a href="#G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br/>
89 <h2 id="C_B">Build-time problems</h2>
91 <a href="#B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</strike></a><br/>
92 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br/>
93 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br/>
94 <a href="#B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a><br/>
96 <h2 id="C_F">Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h2>
98 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br/>
99 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br/>
100 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a><br/>
101 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br/>
103 <h2 id="C_C">Configuration questions</h2>
105 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root
106 on my own machine?</a><br/>
107 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get
108 killed when I log out?</a><br/>
109 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use
110 with --interface?</a><br/>
111 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam
113 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
114 often than others?</a><br/>
115 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not
116 from an init script.</a><br/>
117 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
121 <h2 id="C_T">How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h2>
123 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br/>
124 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br/>
125 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br/>
126 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br/>
127 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br/>
128 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br/>
129 <a href="#T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a><br/>
130 <a href="#T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a><br/>
132 <h2 id="C_S">How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h2>
134 <a href="#S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a><br/>
135 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br/>
136 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br/>
137 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br/>
138 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br/>
139 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br/>
140 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br/>
142 <h2 id="C_I">How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h2>
144 <a href="#I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br/>
145 <a href="#I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br/>
146 <a href="#I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br/>
147 <a href="#I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br/>
148 <a href="#I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a><br/>
149 <a href="#I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br/>
150 <a href="#I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br/>
151 <a href="#I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?</a><br/>
153 <h2 id="C_K">How to set up well-known security and authentication
156 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br/>
157 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br/>
158 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br/>
159 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br/>
160 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br/>
161 <a href="#K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to try TLS if the server
162 advertises it?</a><br/>
164 <h2 id="C_R">Runtime fatal errors</h2>
166 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows 'SMTP
167 connect failed' messages.</a><br/>
168 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't
170 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
172 <a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
173 normally otherwise.</a><br/>
174 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
176 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
177 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after
178 an OS upgrade</a><br/>
179 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
180 messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
181 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
182 <a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br/>
183 <a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
184 <a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
187 <h2 id="C_H">Hangs and lockups</h2>
189 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
190 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
192 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
195 <h2 id="C_D">Disappearing mail</h2>
197 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
198 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
199 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
201 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
202 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
205 <h2 id="C_M">Multidrop-mode problems</h2>
207 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
208 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
209 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
210 domain properly.</a><br/>
211 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
212 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
213 <a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
215 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
217 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
219 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
220 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
221 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
225 <h2 id="C_X">Mangled mail</h2>
227 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
228 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
229 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
231 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
232 being split.</a><br/>
233 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
235 <a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
237 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
239 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
241 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
244 <h2 id="C_O">Other problems</h2>
246 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
247 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
248 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
249 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
250 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
252 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
253 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
254 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
255 not the real From address?</a><br/>
256 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
257 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
258 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
260 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
262 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
263 messages over and over?</a><br/>
264 <a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
266 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
267 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
268 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
269 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
270 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
272 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
274 <a href="#O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
275 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter
279 <h1 id="G">General problems</h1>
280 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
283 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
284 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
285 intermittent PPP or SLIP connection to a remote mailserver. It can
286 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards via port
287 25 to the local SMTP listener, enabling all the normal
288 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local
289 mail or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
291 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
292 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
293 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
294 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
295 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
296 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
298 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
299 software. The openness of the sources is the strongest assurance of
300 quality you can have. Extensive peer review by a large,
301 multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as near
302 bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.</p>
304 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
305 href="http://gnu.org//copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
308 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
309 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
311 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
312 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
314 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
315 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
316 href="http://fetchmail.berlios.de/">http://fetchmail.berlios.de/</a>.
317 You can also usually find both in the <a
318 href="http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.html">
319 POP mail tools directory on Sunsite</a>.</p>
321 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
322 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
323 may not be completely current.</p>
325 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix
328 <p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
329 fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
330 save us both time if you upgrade and test with <a href="#G2">the latest
331 version</a> <em>before</em> sending in a bug report.</p>
333 <p>I will fix bugs, provided you include enough diagnostic information
334 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
335 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
336 When reporting bugs, please include the following:</p>
339 <li>Your operating system.</li>
341 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
342 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
345 <li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.</li>
347 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
350 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
352 <li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
353 command-line options you used.</li>
356 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
357 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
358 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
360 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
361 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
362 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
363 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
364 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
365 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
366 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
367 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
368 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
369 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
370 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
371 introduced -- and with information like that, I can usually come up
372 with a fix very quickly.</p>
374 <p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to
375 test for IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe
376 function of fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf
377 doesn't tell you it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak,
378 poorly-designed protocol with chronic problems, and the later
379 versions after RFC1725 actually get worse rather than better.
380 Changing over to IMAP4 may well make your problem go away -- and if
381 your ISP doesn't have IMAP4 support, bug them to supply it.</p>
383 <p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
384 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
385 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
386 the passwords first!</p>
388 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
389 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
390 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
391 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
392 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
393 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
394 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
395 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
397 <p>A transcript of the failed session with -v -v (yes, that's
398 <em>two</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost always be
399 useful. It is very important that the transcript include your
400 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of
401 server problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords,
402 which are specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be
405 <p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should
406 include session transcripts with -v -v of both the working and
407 failing versions. Very often, the source of the problem can
408 instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
411 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
412 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
413 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
414 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
417 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
420 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
423 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
424 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
426 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed very quickly,
427 often within 48 hours. Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If
428 the solution isn't obvious when I first look, it may evade me for a
429 long time (or to put it another way, fetchmail is well enough
430 tested that the easy bugs have long since been found). So if you
431 want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just sufficient but nearly
432 <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to reproduce it.</p>
434 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
435 Will you add it?</a></h2>
437 <p>If it's reasonable for fetchmail and cannot be solved with reasonable
438 effort outside of fetchmail, perhaps.</p>
440 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
441 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
442 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
443 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
444 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
446 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
447 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
448 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
449 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
451 <p>fetchmail's first job is transport though, and it should do this
452 well. If a feature would cause fetchmail to deteriorate in other
453 respects, the feature will probably not be added.</p>
455 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
456 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
457 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
458 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
459 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
460 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
462 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like
463 Outlook Express.</a></h2>
465 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
466 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
467 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
468 <code>keep</code> option as a sort of poor man's newsgroup
469 facility. Microsoft's Outlook Express supports this.</p>
471 <p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
472 spare time of developers permitting.</p>
474 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
477 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list (fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de)
478 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
479 fetchmail. It's a Mailman list, see <a
480 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>.</p>
481 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
482 (fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de) for people who want to discuss
483 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
484 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
485 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.
486 There is also an announcements-only list,
487 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de, which you can sign up for at <a
488 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
490 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
491 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
493 <p>The fetchmail development was also a sociological experiment, an
494 extended test to see if my theory about the critical features of
495 the Linux development model is correct.</p>
497 <p>The experiment was a success. I wrote a paper about it titled <a
498 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
499 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
500 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
501 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
502 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
503 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape tell me it helped
505 href="http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
506 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
508 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
509 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
511 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
514 <p>The short answer: IMAP 2000 running over Unix.</p>
516 <p>Here's a longer answer:</p>
518 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
519 that conforms to the relevant RFCs (and even some outright broken
520 ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
521 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works
522 equally well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers
523 without LAST, limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways
524 described on the manual page.</p>
526 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
527 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
528 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
529 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by running
530 fetchmail in AUTO mode, or by using the 'Probe for supported
531 protocols' function in the fetchmailconf utility).</p>
533 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
534 IMAP4rev1 server; it has the best facilities for tracking message
535 'seen' states. It also recovers from interrupted connections more
536 gracefully than POP3, and enables some significant performance
537 optimizations. The new <a
538 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.tar.Z">IMAP 2000</a>
539 is particularly nice, as it supports CRAM-MD5 so you don't have to
540 ship your mail password over the net en clair (fetchmail
541 autodetects this capability). Older versions had support for GSSAPI
542 giving a similar effect.</p>
544 <p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just
545 plain broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle
546 the sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even
547 Microsoft itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail
548 service runs over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John
549 Kirch's excellent <a href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white
550 paper</a> on Unix vs. NT performance.</p>
552 <p>Source for a high-quality supported implementation of POP is
553 available from the <a
554 href="ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/">Eudora
555 FTP site</a>. Don't use 2.5, which has a rather restrictive
556 license. The 2.5.2 version appears to restore the open-source
557 license of previous versions.</p>
559 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
560 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
562 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
563 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
564 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
565 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
566 popular Unix mail agents -- <a
567 href="http://www.myxa.com/old/elm.html">elm</a>, <a
568 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
569 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
570 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> -- will work fine with
573 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
574 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. My own personal
575 mail setup is sendmail plus fetchmail plus mutt. Mutt's interface
576 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
577 elm, but its excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it in a class
578 by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though; most
579 of the mutt developers will cheerfully admit that fetchmail's is
582 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
585 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
586 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
589 <p>Most people use fetchmail over phone wires (whether plain old
590 copper or DSL), which are hard to tap. Anybody with the skill and
591 resources to do this could get into your server mailbox with much less
592 effort by subverting the server host. So if your provider setup is
593 phone-company wire going straight into a service box, you probably
594 don't need to worry.</p>
596 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
597 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
598 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
599 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
600 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
601 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
603 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
604 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
605 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
606 to use end-to-end encryption on your whole mail stream so none of
607 it can be read. One of the advantages of fetchmail over
608 conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able to arrange
609 this by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
611 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
612 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
613 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
614 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
615 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
616 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
618 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
619 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
620 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
621 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
624 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
625 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
626 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
627 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
630 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, you'll have CRAM-MD5
631 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
634 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
635 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
636 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
637 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
638 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
639 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
640 You can register a secret on the host (using
641 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like it). Specify the
642 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
643 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
644 back the the server for verification.</p>
646 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
647 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
648 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
651 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
652 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
653 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
654 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
655 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
656 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
659 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
660 use their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
661 href="#I1">I1</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
662 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
664 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
665 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
666 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
667 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
668 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
669 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
670 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
671 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
673 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
674 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
675 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
677 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
678 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
679 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
680 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
682 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
683 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
685 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
686 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
688 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
689 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT
690 TO address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
691 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
692 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
693 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
695 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
696 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
697 client machine had when it started up.</p>
699 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
700 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
701 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
702 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
703 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
704 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
706 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
707 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
708 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
709 or you can use the IP address itself).</p>
711 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
712 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
713 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
714 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
715 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
717 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
718 option when initially developing your poll configuration -- it's
719 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
720 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
721 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
724 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
725 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
726 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
727 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
728 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
729 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
730 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
733 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
734 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
735 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
736 not yet widely deployed, as of early 2001.</p>
738 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
739 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
740 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname your giving
741 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
742 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
743 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
750 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
753 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
756 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
757 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
758 mailhost.) See the <a
759 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
762 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
763 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
765 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
766 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
767 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
768 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
771 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
772 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
774 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
775 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
777 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
778 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
780 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
781 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
782 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
783 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
784 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
786 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
787 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
788 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
789 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
790 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
792 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
793 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
795 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
797 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
798 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
799 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
800 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
803 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
804 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
806 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
807 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
808 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
809 different problem.</p>
811 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
812 heavy loads?</a></h2>
814 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
815 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
816 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
817 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory.</p>
819 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
820 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
821 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
822 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
823 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
825 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
826 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
827 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
828 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
829 but not necessarily latency).</p>
832 <h1>Build-time problems</h1>
833 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
834 FreeBSD.</strike></a></h2>
836 <p style="font-style:italic;">As of release 6.3.0, fetchmail's
837 Makefile[.in] should work flawlessly with BSD's portable make used on
838 FreeBSD. With older releases, use GNU make (usually installed as
839 <code>gmake</code>).</p>
841 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
842 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
844 <p>fetchmail 6.3.0 and newer ship with the lexer and parser in .c
845 formats, so you do not need to use lex unless you hacked the .l or .y
848 <p>fetchmail's lexer has been developed with GNU flex, and the lex tools
849 shipped by some UNIX vendors (HP, SGI, Sun) are known to be incapable of
850 compiling fetchmail's lexer.</p>
852 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
853 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
855 <p>If you get errors resembling these:</p>
858 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
859 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
860 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
861 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
862 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
865 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
866 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
868 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
872 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
873 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
874 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
875 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
876 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
877 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
878 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
879 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
882 <p>install an up to date version of GNU gettext, reconfigure and rebuild
883 fetchmail. If that does not help, reconfigure with '--disable-nls' added
884 to the "./configure" command and rebuild.</p>
886 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
889 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
892 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h1>
893 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
894 longer work?</a></h2>
896 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
898 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
899 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
901 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
903 <p>The 'via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
904 gone. Use the %h feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
906 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
908 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
909 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
910 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
912 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
914 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
915 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
916 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
917 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
918 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
920 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
921 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
922 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
923 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
924 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
926 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
927 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
928 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
930 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
932 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
933 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
935 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
937 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
938 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
939 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
940 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
941 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
944 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
946 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
947 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
948 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
949 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
950 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
951 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
953 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
954 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
955 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
958 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
959 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
960 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
961 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
963 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
964 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
965 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
966 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
967 contact the maintainer.</p>
969 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
971 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
972 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
973 parser will utter a warning.</p>
975 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
977 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
978 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
979 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
980 attached to a server entry.</p>
982 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
983 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
984 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
987 poll openmail protocol pop3
988 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
991 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
992 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
995 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
996 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
998 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
1000 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
1001 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
1003 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
1004 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
1005 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
1007 <p>If you had something like</p>
1010 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
1013 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
1014 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
1015 'defaults' declaration.</p>
1017 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
1018 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1020 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1021 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1023 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1026 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1027 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1028 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1031 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1032 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1034 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1035 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1037 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1038 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1039 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1040 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1042 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1043 around your token.</p>
1045 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1046 don't understand.</a></h2>
1048 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1049 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1050 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1051 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1053 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1054 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1055 feature to work.</p>
1058 <h1>Configuration questions</h1>
1059 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1060 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1062 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1064 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1065 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1068 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1071 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1072 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1073 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1074 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1078 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1082 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1083 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1085 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1086 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1087 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1092 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1093 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1094 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1095 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1097 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1098 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1101 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1102 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1105 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1106 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1107 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1108 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1111 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1112 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1113 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1114 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1116 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1117 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1119 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1120 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1121 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1122 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1123 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1124 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1126 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1127 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1128 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1129 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1130 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1131 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1133 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1134 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1136 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1137 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1139 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1140 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1141 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1142 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1145 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1146 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1147 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1148 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1149 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1150 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1153 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1154 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1155 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1156 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1157 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1158 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1159 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1160 one secure link.</p>
1162 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1165 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1168 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1171 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1172 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1173 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1174 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1175 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1178 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1181 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1182 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1183 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1185 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1186 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1187 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1188 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1191 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1192 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1193 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1194 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1195 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1198 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1199 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1200 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1201 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1204 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1207 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1208 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1211 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1214 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1215 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1217 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1218 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1219 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1221 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1222 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1223 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1224 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1226 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1227 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1230 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1231 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1235 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1236 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1237 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1238 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1239 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti-spam.html">sendmail
1240 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1242 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1245 makemap hash deny <deny
1248 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1250 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1251 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1252 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1253 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1254 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1256 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1257 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1258 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1261 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1262 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1264 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1265 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1266 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1267 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1270 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1271 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1274 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1275 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1276 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1277 every 30 minutes.</p>
1279 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1280 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1282 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1283 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1284 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1285 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1286 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1288 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1289 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1292 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1295 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1296 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1297 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1300 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
1301 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1304 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1305 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1306 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1307 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1309 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1310 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1311 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1313 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1314 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1315 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1317 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1318 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1319 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1320 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1322 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1323 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1324 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1325 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1326 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1327 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1328 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1329 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1331 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1332 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1336 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1339 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1340 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1341 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1342 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1343 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1344 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1345 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1346 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1347 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1348 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1352 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1354 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1355 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1356 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1357 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1360 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1361 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1362 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1363 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1364 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1365 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1368 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1369 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1370 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1371 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1372 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1373 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1375 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1376 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1377 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1380 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1381 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1382 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1383 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1384 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1385 at start of a text line.</p>
1387 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1390 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1391 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1394 <p>(This information is thanks to Robert de Bath
1395 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1397 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package (see <a
1398 href="http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html">http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html</a>)
1399 then, providing the local hosts are also using qmail, it is
1400 possible to set up one fetchmail link to be reliably collect the
1401 mail for an entire domain.</p>
1403 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1404 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1405 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1406 on this line. The major reason for this is to prevent mail
1409 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site the
1410 ISP-mailhost will have normally put that site in its 'virtualhosts'
1411 control file so it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this
1412 site. This results in mail sent to
1413 'username@userhost.userdom.dom.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1417 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.dom.com
1420 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1423 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.dom.com
1426 <p>The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1427 but a string matching the user host name is likely.</p>
1429 <p>To use this line you must:</p>
1432 <li>Ensure the option 'envelope Delivered-To:' is in the fetchmail
1435 <li>Ensure you have a localdomains containing 'userdom.dom.com' or
1436 'userhost.dom.com' respectively.</li>
1439 <p>So far this reliably delivers messages to the correct machine of
1440 the local network, to deliver to the correct user the
1441 'mbox-userstr-' prefix must be stripped off of the user name. This
1442 can be done by setting up an alias within the qmail MTA on each
1443 local machine. Simply create a dot-qmail file called
1444 '.qmail-mbox-userstr-default' in the alias directory (normally
1445 /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:</p>
1448 | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"
1451 <p>Note this <em>does</em> require a modern /bin/sh.</p>
1453 <p>Peter Wilson adds:</p>
1455 <p>"My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means
1456 that I need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is
1457 due to qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is
1458 handled by the file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or
1459 ~user/.qmail-default)."</p>
1461 <p>Luca Olivetti adds:</p>
1463 <p>If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up
1464 the alias mechanism described above, you can use the option
1465 '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' in your fetchmail config
1466 file to strip the prefix from the local user name.</p>
1468 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1471 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1473 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1474 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1475 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1476 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1477 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1479 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1480 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1481 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1484 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1487 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1489 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1490 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1491 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1492 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1493 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1494 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1496 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1497 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1498 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1499 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1502 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1503 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1504 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1508 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1511 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1512 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1513 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1514 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1516 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1519 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1520 work fine out of the box.</p>
1522 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1523 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1524 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1525 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1526 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1529 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1530 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1531 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1532 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1533 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1534 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1535 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1537 <p>You may also need to say
1538 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1539 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1540 recipient addresses.</p>
1542 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1545 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1546 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1548 href="http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1549 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1552 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1555 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1556 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1557 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1559 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1562 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1563 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1564 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1566 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1568 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1570 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1573 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
1574 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1577 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3
1578 servers, and is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some
1579 problems which fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a
1580 href="#G8">IMAP</a> instead if at all possible. If you must talk to
1581 qpopper, here are some problems to be aware of:</p>
1583 <h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
1586 href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a> reports
1587 that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper 2.5.3
1588 under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to 2.0.35.
1589 When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3, fetchmail
1590 will hang with a socket error.</p>
1592 <p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of
1593 some problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission
1594 pattern is tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also
1595 displays the hang but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The
1596 problem can also be banished by <a
1597 href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to
1598 qpopper 3.0b1</a>.</p>
1600 <h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
1602 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
1603 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a
1604 href="#X5">X5</a> for details. The solution is to upgrade your
1607 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1610 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1611 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1612 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1613 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1614 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1615 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1617 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1618 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1619 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1621 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1622 with M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with
1623 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1624 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1625 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1628 <p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1629 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1630 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1631 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1634 <p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
1635 features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1636 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1637 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1638 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1639 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1640 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1642 <p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
1643 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1646 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1647 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1650 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1651 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1654 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1656 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1658 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1660 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1663 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1665 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1667 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1669 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1670 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1672 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1674 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1675 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1678 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1680 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1683 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1686 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1687 System\Pop3 Performance
1691 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1693 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1694 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1696 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1697 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1698 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1700 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1702 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1706 <p>The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me
1707 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1710 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1711 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1712 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1714 <p>This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to
1715 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1716 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1717 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1718 name from your username.</p>
1720 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1721 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1722 username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame,
1723 almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in
1726 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1729 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1730 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1732 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1733 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1736 <p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
1737 ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
1738 Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris
1741 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1744 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1745 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1746 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1747 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1748 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1749 Resent- headers.</p>
1751 <p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to
1752 get a POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead.
1753 OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1756 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1757 command fails, returning only one line regrardless of its argument,
1758 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1760 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1762 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named
1763 GroupFoolish; it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably
1764 broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required content
1765 length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1767 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend
1768 voting with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you
1769 stick with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will
1770 probably pay for it with other problems.</p>
1772 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1773 InterChange?</a></h2>
1775 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1776 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server;
1777 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1778 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1780 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing
1781 me that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this
1782 problem. I don't have any reports one way or the other yet.</p>
1784 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1786 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1787 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1788 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1790 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1791 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1792 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1793 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1794 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1796 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1798 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1799 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1800 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1804 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h1>
1805 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1807 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1808 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1809 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1810 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1811 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1812 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1815 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1816 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1817 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1818 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1819 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1820 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1821 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1822 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1823 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1825 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1826 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1828 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1829 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1832 # This version will use RPA
1833 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1834 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1835 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1837 # This version will not use RPA
1838 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1839 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1840 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1843 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1844 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1846 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1848 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1849 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1850 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1851 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1853 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1854 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1855 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1858 set postmaster "philh"
1859 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1860 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1863 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1865 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1866 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1867 maildrop, like this:</p>
1870 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1871 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1874 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1875 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1876 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1877 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1878 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1879 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1880 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1883 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1884 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1888 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1889 30 days old; see their <a
1890 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/products/mail/sdps-tech.shtml">POP3
1891 page</a> for details.</p>
1893 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1895 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1896 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1897 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1898 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1900 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1901 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1902 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1903 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1906 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1907 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1908 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1911 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1912 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1913 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1915 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1918 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1919 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1920 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1921 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1922 certainly a server bug.</p>
1924 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1925 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1926 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1927 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1928 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1929 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1931 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1932 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1933 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1935 <p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's
1936 servers. They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding
1937 another provider.)</p>
1939 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1940 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1942 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1943 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1944 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1945 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1946 any of the following headers.</p>
1948 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "--mda" switch:</p>
1951 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1954 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1956 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1957 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1958 already been read.</p>
1960 <p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
1961 Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.</p>
1963 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1965 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1966 webmail with the help of the <a
1967 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1968 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1969 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1970 configuration should look like this:</p>
1973 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1974 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1975 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
1979 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
1980 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
1982 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1984 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1985 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1986 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
1988 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
1989 as the only appropriate response.</p>
1991 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1992 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1993 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
1996 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1998 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
1999 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
2000 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
2001 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
2004 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?</a></h2>
2006 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a comcast.net server...<em>but</em>
2007 the Maillennium POP3 server comcast use seems to have an 80 kB limit on
2008 the length of downloaded messages if you use POP3 TOP to retrieve.
2009 Anything larger is silently truncated. Don't mistake this for a
2010 fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.)</p>
2012 <p>Beginning with version 6.3.2, fetchmail will fall back to the RETR
2013 command if the greeting string contains "Maillennium POP3/PROXY server",
2014 and print a warning message. This means however that fetchmail has no
2015 means to prevent the "seen" flag from being set on the server.</p>
2017 <p>Workaround for older versions: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
2020 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
2022 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
2024 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports
2025 linking with socks library. If you specify the value of this option
2026 as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2027 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2028 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2030 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may
2031 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2033 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2036 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2037 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2040 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2042 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp</a></p>
2044 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2049 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2050 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2053 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2056 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2060 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2063 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2064 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2065 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2066 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2067 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2068 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2069 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2070 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2072 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2073 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2074 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2075 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2077 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2078 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2080 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2081 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos
2082 V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2083 IMAP server. UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
2084 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
2085 is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for
2086 other reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and
2087 it has to have GSS support compiled in.</p>
2089 <p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by
2090 default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
2091 distribution (available via FTP at <a
2092 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
2093 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2094 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2095 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2096 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2097 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2099 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2100 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2101 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2102 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2103 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2104 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2105 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2107 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2108 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2109 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2110 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2111 Kerberos principal.</p>
2113 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2114 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2116 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2119 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2120 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed.
2121 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2122 installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl) ths will
2123 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2124 you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after an
2127 <p>Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek
2128 under OpenSSL versions 0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally
2129 tripped over, causing hangs. It is recommended that you install
2132 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2133 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2134 SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2135 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2136 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2138 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2139 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2140 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2141 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2142 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2143 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2145 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2146 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2147 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2148 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2150 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2151 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work:</p>
2154 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2155 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2158 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2159 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2160 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2161 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2162 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2164 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2165 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2166 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2167 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2168 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2169 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2171 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2172 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2173 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2176 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2177 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2178 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2179 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2180 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2181 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2184 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2188 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2189 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2192 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2193 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2196 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2197 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2198 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2199 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2200 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2201 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2202 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2204 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2205 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2206 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2207 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2208 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2211 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2212 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar
2213 ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2216 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2217 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2218 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2219 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2221 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2222 if the server advertises it?</a></h2>
2224 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2225 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2226 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2227 his certificates properly.</p>
2229 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2230 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2232 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2234 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2235 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2236 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2237 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2240 <h1>Runtime fatal errors</h1>
2241 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2242 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2244 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2245 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2247 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2248 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2249 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2250 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2251 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2253 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2254 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2255 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2257 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2258 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2259 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2260 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2261 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2262 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2263 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2265 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2266 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2267 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2269 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2270 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2271 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2272 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2273 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2274 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2276 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2277 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2278 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2279 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2281 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2282 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2283 than one IP address.</p>
2285 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2286 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2287 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2293 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2294 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2295 Make sure it says something like</p>
2301 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2304 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2305 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2306 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2307 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2308 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2310 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2311 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2312 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2313 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2315 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2316 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2317 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2319 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2320 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2322 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2323 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2325 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2326 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2327 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2328 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2330 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2331 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2332 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2335 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2336 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2338 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2339 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2340 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2341 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2343 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2345 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2346 href="ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/~ftp/pub/gnu">flex</a> from the Free
2347 Software Foundation. An FSF <a
2348 href="http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/order/ftp.html">mirror site</a>
2349 will help you get it faster.</p>
2351 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2352 operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
2354 <p>We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and
2355 gcc-2.7.2. It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier
2358 <p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library
2361 <p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
2362 version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
2363 calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
2364 Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
2365 calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself,
2366 not the fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an
2367 fclose called directly by fetchmail, either).</p>
2369 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2370 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2373 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2374 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2375 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2376 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2377 reportt no problem.</p>
2379 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2380 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2381 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2382 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2384 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2385 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2388 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2391 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2392 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2393 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2394 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2395 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2396 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2398 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2401 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2402 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2403 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2404 are option values that work:</p>
2411 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2412 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2413 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2414 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2415 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2416 corresponding IP address.</p>
2418 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2419 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2421 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2422 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2423 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2424 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2427 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2428 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2430 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2431 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2435 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2436 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2437 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2438 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2439 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2441 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2442 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2443 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2444 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2447 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2449 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2450 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2454 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2457 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2458 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2459 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2460 packet-fragmentation problem, that's where you'll see it.</p>
2462 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2465 <p>This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your
2466 MDA is croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove
2467 the <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP
2470 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
2471 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
2472 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
2473 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
2474 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
2475 at start of a text line.</p>
2477 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2478 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2480 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2481 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2483 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2484 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2485 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2486 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2487 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2488 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2489 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2490 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2491 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table
2492 summary="Common port addresses for IMAP, POP3 and their SSL
2494 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2495 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2496 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2497 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2498 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2502 <h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
2503 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2506 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2507 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2508 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2510 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2513 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2514 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2517 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2520 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2521 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2522 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2523 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2525 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2528 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2530 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2532 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2540 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2543 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2547 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2550 <p>For more details consult the file
2551 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2553 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2556 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2557 but hangs returning:</p>
2560 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2561 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2562 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2563 .......fetchmail: flushed
2564 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2565 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2568 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2571 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2575 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
2576 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2577 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2579 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2580 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2582 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2583 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2584 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2586 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2587 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2589 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2593 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2596 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2598 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2599 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2601 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2602 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2603 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2604 also truncates long lines at column 1024)</p>
2606 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2607 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it
2608 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2609 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2611 <p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to
2612 restore the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If
2613 you have one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a
2614 small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP
2615 connects to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes
2616 to the queue more often.</p>
2618 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better
2619 behaved. If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all
2620 DELE commands as though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical
2621 violation of the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky
2622 phone lines). Then it will re-queue any message that was being
2623 downloaded at hangup time. Still, qpopper may require a noticeable
2624 amount of time to do deletions and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail
2625 waits a bit before retrying in order to avoid a 'lock busy'
2628 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2629 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2631 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2632 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2633 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2634 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2635 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2637 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2638 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2639 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2640 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2641 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2642 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2643 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2645 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2648 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a>
2652 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems</h1>
2653 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2654 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2656 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2657 recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
2658 matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
2659 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2660 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2661 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2663 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration
2664 problem either on the server or your client machine.</p>
2666 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2667 necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
2668 mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2669 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be
2670 uncollected if it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you
2671 don't have listed).</p>
2673 <p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can
2674 hurt you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
2675 intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the
2678 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2679 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2681 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2682 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2684 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2685 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2686 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2687 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2689 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2690 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2691 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2692 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2693 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2694 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2696 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2697 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2698 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2699 MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
2700 is with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2702 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2705 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2706 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2708 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2709 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2710 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2711 multidrop routing.</p>
2713 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2715 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2716 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2717 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2718 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2720 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2721 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2722 that is useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set
2723 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2724 bamboozled by this.</p>
2726 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2727 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2730 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2731 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2733 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2734 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2735 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2736 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2738 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2739 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2741 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2742 having DNS problems.</a></h2>
2744 <p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
2745 href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the
2746 reference to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently
2747 in some older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version
2750 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2751 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2752 won't be, and this problem should go away.</p>
2754 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2755 message is processed.</a></h2>
2757 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2758 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2759 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2762 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2763 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2764 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2766 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2767 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2768 address is valid.</p>
2770 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2771 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2773 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2774 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2775 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2776 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2777 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2779 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2780 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2783 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2785 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2786 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2787 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2790 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2793 #############################################
2794 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2795 #############################################
2797 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2799 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2800 ---------------------------
2802 -------------------------
2803 # handle virtual users
2805 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2806 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2807 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2808 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2809 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2812 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2813 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2814 work. Michael says:</p>
2816 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2817 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2818 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2821 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2822 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2824 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2825 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2826 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2829 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2831 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2832 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2833 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2834 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2836 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2837 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2838 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2839 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2840 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2842 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2844 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2847 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2848 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2849 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2852 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2853 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2854 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2855 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2856 as an alias of your server.</p>
2858 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2861 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2862 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2863 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2864 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2865 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2867 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2868 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2869 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2870 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2871 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2872 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2875 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2876 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2877 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2878 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2882 <h1>Mangled mail</h1>
2883 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2884 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2886 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2887 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2888 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2889 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2890 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2892 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2893 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2894 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2895 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2896 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as maildrop) and
2897 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2899 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2902 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2903 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2904 the server and choked on by an old version of
2905 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2907 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2908 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2909 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2910 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2912 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of
2913 line are being split.</a></h2>
2915 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2916 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2917 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2920 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2921 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2922 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2923 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2925 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2926 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2927 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2930 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2931 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2932 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2933 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2934 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2935 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2936 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2937 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2939 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2940 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2943 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2946 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2947 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2948 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2949 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2951 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2952 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2953 different way</a></h2>
2955 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2956 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2957 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2958 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
2961 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
2962 order they pass your mail:</p>
2965 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
2967 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
2969 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
2971 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
2973 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2974 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
2977 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
2978 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
2979 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
2980 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
2981 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
2983 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
2984 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
2985 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
2988 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2991 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
2992 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
2993 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
2994 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
2995 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
2996 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
2998 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
2999 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
3000 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
3001 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
3002 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
3004 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
3005 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
3006 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
3007 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
3008 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
3009 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
3010 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
3012 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
3013 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
3014 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
3015 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
3016 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
3017 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
3018 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
3019 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
3020 actual password.</p>
3022 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
3023 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
3024 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
3025 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
3026 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
3027 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
3028 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
3029 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
3030 operating system.</p>
3032 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
3033 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
3034 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
3035 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
3036 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
3037 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
3039 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3040 fetching too much!</a></h2>
3042 <p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before
3043 4.4.8. Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than
3044 RETR, in order to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen
3045 is helpful for later recovery if you lose your connection in the
3046 middle of a retrieval).</p>
3048 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
3049 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP
3050 bounds check was fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP
3051 argument. Decrementing the TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.</p>
3053 <p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.</p>
3055 <p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
3056 this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.</p>
3058 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3059 or mangled.</a></h2>
3061 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3062 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3063 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3064 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3065 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3067 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3068 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3069 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3070 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3071 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3072 only effective solution.</p>
3074 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3075 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3076 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3079 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3080 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3081 you're having this problem. The <a
3082 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3085 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3086 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3089 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3090 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3091 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3092 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3095 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3096 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3097 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3098 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3099 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3100 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3101 generates different Boundary tags for each part, .e.g. one tag is
3102 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3103 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3104 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3105 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3107 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3108 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3109 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3110 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3111 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3112 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3114 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3115 attachments is the <a
3116 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3118 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3119 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3120 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3121 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3122 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3125 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3126 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3127 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3128 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3131 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3136 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3137 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3138 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3139 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3141 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3144 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3145 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3149 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3150 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3151 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3152 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3153 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3154 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3155 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3156 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3157 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3158 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3159 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3160 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3161 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3163 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3166 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3168 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3170 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3172 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3173 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3175 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3177 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3180 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3181 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3182 internet interoperability.</p>
3184 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3185 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3186 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3187 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3188 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3189 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3190 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3191 mailtool's format.</p>
3193 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3196 <p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know
3197 anything about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any
3198 differently from plain message data.</p>
3200 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3201 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3202 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3203 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3204 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3205 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3206 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3207 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3209 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3210 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3211 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3212 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3213 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3214 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3216 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3219 <p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
3220 Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3221 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%.
3222 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3223 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3226 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3227 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3230 <p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3231 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3232 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</p>
3234 <p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3235 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3236 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3237 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3238 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3239 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3242 <p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3243 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3244 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3245 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3253 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p>
3255 <p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3256 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.</p>
3258 <p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3259 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3260 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</p>
3262 <p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
3263 href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.</p>
3266 <h1>Other problems</h1>
3267 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3268 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3270 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3271 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3272 the log, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To
3273 get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3274 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it
3275 already exists).</p>
3277 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message
3278 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3280 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3281 which Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of
3282 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3283 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3289 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3295 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3296 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3297 /etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.</p>
3299 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3312 to solve the problem system-wide.
3314 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3315 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3317 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3318 your rc file and restart, reading it.</p>
3320 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3321 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3323 <p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an
3324 IMAP with a long expunge interval.</p>
3326 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3327 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3328 fix this, because doing it right takes cooperation from the server.
3329 There are two possible remedies:</p>
3331 <p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
3332 the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
3333 doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as
3334 well as on processing a QUIT command.</p>
3336 <p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
3337 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
3338 command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages
3339 immediately after they are downloaded.</p>
3341 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3342 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3343 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3344 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3346 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3347 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3349 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3350 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3353 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3354 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3355 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3356 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3357 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3359 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3360 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3361 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3363 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3364 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3365 the log will look right.</p>
3367 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3368 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3370 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3371 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3373 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3374 to fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
3375 <code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
3376 fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>,
3377 and that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably
3378 also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.</p>
3380 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by
3381 reconfiguring with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3383 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3384 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3385 Switching to a faster MTA like qmail or exim might help.</p>
3387 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3388 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3390 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3393 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3394 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3395 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3397 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3398 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3399 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3400 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3401 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3404 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3406 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3407 option working?</a></h2>
3409 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3410 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3411 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3412 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3413 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3414 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3415 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3416 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3418 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3419 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3421 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3422 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3423 turn <cite>keep</cite> off.</p>
3425 <p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL
3426 feature that can lead to all your old messages being seen again
3427 after a line drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL
3428 code breaks worse every time I touch it. The problem is
3429 fundamental; maintaining and garbage-collecting the right kind of
3430 client-side state is just hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and
3431 removed LAST should be hung up by his thumbs and whipped with
3432 scorpions. The right answers are either (a) live with the
3433 occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4, or (c) fix the code
3434 yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose (c), I don't want
3435 to hear about it.</p>
3437 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3438 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3439 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3440 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3441 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3442 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3443 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3445 <p>James Stevens <James.Stevens at kyzo.com> writes:</p>
3447 <p><em>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from
3448 an NT POP3 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting
3449 each e-mail one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very
3450 unreliable and would often just drop out in the middle of a
3453 <p><em>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated
3454 normally (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll
3455 back all the deletes !!!</em></p>
3457 <p><em>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just
3458 end up continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or,
3459 if the queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
3460 connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back
3461 any deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the
3462 first few e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became
3463 fuller and fuller the chances of getting a connection long enough
3464 to collect theentire mailbox became smaller and smaller.</em></p>
3466 <p><em>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5
3467 or 10) e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3
3468 connection is terminated correctly.</em></p>
3470 <p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
3471 to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
3472 switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.</p>
3474 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my
3475 messages the same?</a></h2>
3477 <p>This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking
3478 the received date from the last Received header.</p>
3480 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3481 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3483 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.</p>
3485 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3486 get the message only once per run.</p>
3488 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3489 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3491 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3493 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3495 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3496 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3497 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3498 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3500 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3502 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3503 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3504 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3505 your local server is.</p>
3507 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>.</p>
3509 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3512 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3514 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3516 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3517 does something like "date >> $HOME/Procmail/fetchmail.log".</p>
3519 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3522 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> (available since release 6.3.0) to
3523 delete oversized mails along with the <code>--limit</code> option. If
3524 you are already having <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete
3525 oversized mails, <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to
3526 avoid losing mails unintentionally.</p>
3528 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3529 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3530 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3531 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3532 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3533 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3534 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3536 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3539 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3540 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3541 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3542 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3543 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3544 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3549 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3550 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3551 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3552 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3553 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3554 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3557 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3558 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3559 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3560 with the data reset to initial values.
3564 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3565 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3566 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3567 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3569 <h2><a name="O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
3570 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter format?</a></h2>
3572 <p>All the world uses ISO-216:1975 "A4" paper except for North America.
3573 Using A4 format reaches far more people than (formerly known as DIN A4,
3574 from DIN 476) format. Besides that, A4 paper <em>is</em> available in North
3576 For further information on the Letter-vs-A4 story, see:</p>
3577 <ul><li><a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html">Markus
3578 Kuhn: "International standard paper sizes"</a></li>
3580 href="http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/">Brian
3581 Forte: "A4 vs US Letter"</a></li></ul>
3583 <p>Offering the document formatted for two different paper sizes would
3584 bloat the package beyond reason, and formatting in a way that fits A4
3585 and Letter paper formats would be a waste of paper in most parts of the
3586 world. For that reason, fetchmail only ships with an A4 formatted PDF
3589 <p>To create a letter-sized PDF, install <a
3590 href="http://www.htmldoc.org/">HTMLDOC</a>, edit
3591 <code>fetchmail-FAQ.book</code> in the source directory with your
3592 favorite text editor, replace <samp>--size A4</samp> by <samp>--size
3593 letter</samp>, and type:
3596 make fetchmail-FAQ.pdf
3601 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
3603 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
3605 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
3610 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3611 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3612 Matthias Andree</address>