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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 or other
152 Maillennium servers?</a><br/>
154 <h2 id="C_K">How to set up well-known security and authentication
157 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br/>
158 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br/>
159 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br/>
160 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br/>
161 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br/>
162 <a href="#K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to try TLS if the server
163 advertises it?</a><br/>
165 <h2 id="C_R">Runtime fatal errors</h2>
167 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows 'SMTP
168 connect failed' messages.</a><br/>
169 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't
171 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
173 <a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
174 normally otherwise.</a><br/>
175 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
177 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
178 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after
179 an OS upgrade</a><br/>
180 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
181 messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
182 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
183 <a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br/>
184 <a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
185 <a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
188 <h2 id="C_H">Hangs and lockups</h2>
190 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
191 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
193 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
196 <h2 id="C_D">Disappearing mail</h2>
198 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
199 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
200 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
202 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
203 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
206 <h2 id="C_M">Multidrop-mode problems</h2>
208 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
209 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
210 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
211 domain properly.</a><br/>
212 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
213 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
214 <a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
216 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
218 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
220 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
221 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
222 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
226 <h2 id="C_X">Mangled mail</h2>
228 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
229 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
230 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
232 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
233 being split.</a><br/>
234 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
236 <a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
238 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
240 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
242 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
244 <a href="#X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
245 with Domino IMAP</a><br/>
246 <h2 id="C_O">Other problems</h2>
248 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
249 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
250 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
251 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
252 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
254 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
255 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
256 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
257 not the real From address?</a><br/>
258 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
259 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
260 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
262 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
264 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
265 messages over and over?</a><br/>
266 <a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
268 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
269 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
270 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
271 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
272 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
274 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
276 <a href="#O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
277 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter
281 <h1 id="G">General problems</h1>
282 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
285 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
286 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
287 intermittent or dynamic-IP connection to a remote mailserver, SLIP or
288 PPP dialup, or leased line when SMTP isn't desired. Fetchmail can
289 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards to a the
290 local SMTP (via TCP socket) or LMTP (via TCP or Unix socket) listener or
291 into an MDA program, enabling all the normal
292 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local mail
293 or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
295 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
296 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
297 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
298 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
299 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
300 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
302 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">Open Source</a>
303 Software. The openness of the sources enables you to review and
304 customize the code, and contribute your changes.</p>
306 <p>A former fetchmail maintainer once claimed that Open Source software
307 were the strongest quality assurance, but the current maintainers do not
308 believe that open source alone is a criterion for quality – <a
309 href="fetchmail-SA-2005-01.txt">the remotely exploitable POP3
310 vulnerability (CVE-2005-2335)</a> lingered undiscovered in
311 fetchmail's code for years, which is a hint that open source code does
312 not audit itself.</p>
314 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
315 href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
318 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
319 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
321 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
322 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
324 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
325 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
326 href="http://www.fetchmail.info/">http://www.fetchmail.info/</a>.
327 You can also usually find both in the <a
328 href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.short.html">
329 POP mail tools directory on iBiblio</a>.</p>
331 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
332 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
333 may not be completely current.</p>
335 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix
338 <p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
339 fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
340 save us both time if you upgrade and test with <a href="#G2">the latest
341 version</a> <em>before</em> sending in a bug report.</p>
343 <p>Bugs will be fixed, provided you include enough diagnostic information
344 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
345 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
346 When reporting bugs, please include the following:</p>
349 <li>Your operating system.</li>
351 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
352 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
355 <li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.</li>
357 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
360 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
362 <li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
363 command-line options you used.</li>
366 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
367 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
368 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
370 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
371 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
372 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
373 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
374 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
375 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
376 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
377 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
378 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
379 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
380 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
381 introduced – and with information like that, I can usually come up
382 with a fix very quickly.</p>
384 <p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to
385 test for IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe
386 function of fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf
387 doesn't tell you it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak,
388 poorly-designed protocol with chronic problems, and the later
389 versions after RFC1725 actually get worse rather than better.
390 Changing over to IMAP4 may well make your problem go away – and if
391 your ISP doesn't have IMAP4 support, bug them to supply it.</p>
393 <p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
394 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
395 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
396 the passwords first!</p>
398 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
399 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
400 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
401 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
402 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
403 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
404 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
405 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
407 <p>A transcript of the failed session with "--nosyslog --nodetach -vvv"
408 (yes, that's <em>three</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost
409 always be useful. It is very important that the transcript include your
410 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server
411 problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are
412 specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.</p>
414 <p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should
415 include session transcripts with "--nosyslog --nodetach -vvv" of both
416 the working and failing versions. Very often, the source of the problem
417 can instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
420 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
421 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
422 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
423 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
426 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
429 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
430 traced with a debugger such as gdb, dbx or idb.</p>
432 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
433 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
435 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed quite quickly.
436 Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the solution isn't obvious
437 when I first look, it may evade me for a long time (or to put it another
438 way, fetchmail is well enough tested that the easy bugs have long since
439 been found). So if you want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just
440 sufficient but <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to
441 easily reproduce it.</p>
443 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
444 Will you add it?</a></h2>
446 <p>If it's reasonable for fetchmail and cannot be solved with reasonable
447 effort outside of fetchmail, perhaps.</p>
449 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
450 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
451 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
452 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
453 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
455 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
456 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
457 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
458 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
460 <p>fetchmail's first job is transport though, and it should do this
461 well. If a feature would cause fetchmail to deteriorate in other
462 respects, the feature will probably not be added.</p>
464 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
465 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
466 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
467 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
468 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
469 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
471 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like
472 Outlook Express.</a></h2>
474 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
475 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
476 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
477 <code>keep</code> option as a sort of poor man's newsgroup
478 facility. Microsoft's Outlook Express supports this.</p>
480 <p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
481 spare time of developers permitting.</p>
483 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
486 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list
487 <fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de>
488 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
489 fetchmail. It's a Mailman list, see <a
490 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>.</p>
491 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
492 <fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de> for people who want to discuss
493 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
494 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
495 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.
496 There is also an announcements-only list,
497 <fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de>, which you can sign up for at <a
498 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
500 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
501 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
503 <p>Eric S. Raymond also considered fetchmail development a sociological
504 experiment, an extended test to see if my theory about the critical
505 features of the Linux development model is correct.</p>
507 <p>He considers the experiment a success. He wrote a paper about it titled <a
508 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
509 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
510 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
511 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
512 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
513 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape told ESR it helped
515 href="http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
516 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
518 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
519 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
521 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
524 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
525 that conforms to the relevant standards/RFCs (and even some outright
526 broken ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
527 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally
528 well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without UIDL,
529 limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
532 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
533 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
534 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
535 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by using the
536 'Probe for supported protocols' function in the fetchmailconf
537 utility - unfortunately it does not detect SSL-wrapped variants).</p>
539 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
540 IMAP4rev1 or UIDL- and TOP-capable POP3 server. IMAP enables some
541 significant performance optimizations.</p>
543 <p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just
544 plain broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle
545 the sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even
546 Microsoft itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail
547 service runs over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John
548 Kirch's excellent <a href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white
549 paper</a> on Unix vs. NT performance.</p>
551 <p>A decent POP3/IMAP server that has recently become popular is <a
552 href="http://dovecot.org/">Dovecot</a>.</p>
554 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
555 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
557 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
558 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
560 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
561 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
562 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
563 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
564 popular Unix mail agents – <a
565 href="http://www.instinct.org/elm/">elm</a>, <a
566 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
567 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
568 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> – will work fine with
571 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
572 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. Mutt's interface
573 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
574 elm, but its flexibility and excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it
575 in a class by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though.
578 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
581 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
582 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
585 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
586 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
587 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
588 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
589 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
590 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
592 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
593 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
594 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
595 to use end-to-end encryption such as GnuPG (see below) on your whole
596 mail stream so none of it can be read. One of the advantages of
597 fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able
598 to arrange encryption by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
600 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
601 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
602 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
603 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
604 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GnuPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
605 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
607 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
608 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
609 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
610 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
613 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
614 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
615 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
616 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
619 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, it'll have CRAM-MD5
620 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
623 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
624 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
625 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
626 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
627 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
628 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
629 You can register a secret on the host (using
630 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like it). Specify the
631 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
632 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
633 back the the server for verification.</p>
635 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
636 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
637 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
640 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
641 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
642 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
643 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
644 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
645 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
648 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
649 use their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
650 href="#I1">I1</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
651 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
653 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
654 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
655 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
656 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
657 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
658 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
659 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
660 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
662 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
663 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
664 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
666 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
667 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
668 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
669 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
671 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
672 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
674 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
675 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
677 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
678 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO
679 address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
680 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
681 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
682 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
684 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
685 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
686 client machine had when it started up.</p>
688 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
689 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
690 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
691 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
692 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
693 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
695 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
696 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
697 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
698 or you can use the IP address itself.)</p>
700 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
701 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
702 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
703 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
704 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
706 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
707 option when initially developing your poll configuration – it's
708 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
709 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
710 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
713 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
714 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
715 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
716 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
717 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
718 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
719 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
722 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
723 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
724 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
725 still not yet widely deployed, as of 2006.</p>
727 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
728 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
729 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname you're giving
730 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
731 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
732 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
739 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
742 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
745 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
746 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
747 mailhost.) See the <a
748 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
751 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
752 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
754 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
755 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
756 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
757 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
760 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
761 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
763 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
764 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
766 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
767 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
769 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
770 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
771 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
772 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
773 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
775 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
776 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
777 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
778 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
779 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
781 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
782 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
784 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
786 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
787 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
788 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
789 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
792 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
793 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
795 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
796 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
797 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
798 different problem.</p>
800 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
801 heavy loads?</a></h2>
803 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
804 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
805 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
806 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory. It will store
807 the UID or UIDL data in core however, which can become considerable if
808 you are keeping lots of messages on the server.</p>
810 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
811 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
812 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
813 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
814 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
816 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
817 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
818 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
819 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
820 but not necessarily latency).</p>
823 <h1>Build-time problems</h1>
824 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
825 FreeBSD.</strike></a></h2>
827 <p style="font-style:italic;">As of release 6.3.0, fetchmail's
828 Makefile[.in] should work flawlessly with BSD's portable make used on
829 FreeBSD. With older releases, use GNU make (usually installed as
830 <code>gmake</code>).</p>
832 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
833 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
835 <p>fetchmail 6.3.0 and newer ship with the lexer and parser in .c
836 formats, so you do not need to use lex unless you hacked the .l or .y
839 <p>fetchmail's lexer has been developed with GNU flex, and the lex tools
840 shipped by some UNIX vendors (HP, SGI, Sun) are known to be incapable of
841 compiling fetchmail's lexer.</p>
843 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
844 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
846 <p>If you get errors resembling these:</p>
849 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
850 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
851 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
852 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
853 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
856 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
857 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
859 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
863 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
864 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
865 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
866 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
867 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
868 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
869 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
870 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
873 <p>install an up to date version of GNU gettext, reconfigure and rebuild
874 fetchmail. If that does not help, reconfigure with '--disable-nls' added
875 to the "./configure" command and rebuild.</p>
877 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
880 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
883 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h1>
884 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
885 longer work?</a></h2>
887 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
889 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
890 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
892 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
894 <p>The 'via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
895 gone. Use the %h feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
897 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
899 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
900 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
901 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
903 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
905 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
906 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
907 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
908 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
909 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
911 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
912 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
913 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
914 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
915 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
917 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
918 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
919 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
921 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
923 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
924 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
926 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
928 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
929 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
930 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
931 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
932 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
935 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
937 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
938 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
939 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
940 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
941 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
942 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
944 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
945 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
946 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
949 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
950 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
951 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
952 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
954 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
955 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
956 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
957 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
958 contact the maintainer.</p>
960 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
962 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
963 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
964 parser will utter a warning.</p>
966 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
968 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
969 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
970 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
971 attached to a server entry.</p>
973 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
974 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
975 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
978 poll openmail protocol pop3
979 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
982 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
983 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
986 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
987 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
989 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
991 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
992 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
994 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
995 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
996 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
998 <p>If you had something like</p>
1001 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
1004 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
1005 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
1006 'defaults' declaration.</p>
1008 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
1009 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1011 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1012 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1014 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1017 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1018 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1019 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1022 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1023 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1025 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1026 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1028 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1029 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1030 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1031 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1033 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1034 around your token.</p>
1036 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1037 don't understand.</a></h2>
1039 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1040 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1041 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1042 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1044 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1045 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1046 feature to work.</p>
1049 <h1>Configuration questions</h1>
1050 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1051 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1053 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1055 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1056 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1059 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1062 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1063 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1064 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1065 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1069 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1073 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1074 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1076 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1077 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1078 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1083 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1084 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1085 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1086 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1088 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1089 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1092 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1093 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1096 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1097 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1098 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1099 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1102 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1103 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1104 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1105 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1107 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1108 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1110 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1111 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1112 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1113 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1114 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1115 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1117 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1118 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1119 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1120 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1121 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1122 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1124 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1125 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1127 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1128 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1130 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1131 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1132 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1133 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1136 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1137 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1138 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1139 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1140 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1141 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1144 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1145 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1146 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1147 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1148 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1149 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1150 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1151 one secure link.</p>
1153 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1156 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1159 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1162 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1163 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1164 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1165 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1166 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1169 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1172 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1173 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1174 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1176 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1177 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1178 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1179 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1182 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1183 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1184 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1185 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1186 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1189 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1190 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1191 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1192 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1195 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1198 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1199 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1202 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1205 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1206 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1208 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1209 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1210 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1212 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1213 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1214 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1215 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1217 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1218 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1221 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1222 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1226 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1227 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1228 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1229 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1230 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti_spam.html">sendmail
1231 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1233 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1236 makemap hash deny <deny
1239 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1241 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1242 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1243 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1244 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1245 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1247 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1248 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1249 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1252 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1253 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1255 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1256 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1257 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1258 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1261 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1262 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1265 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1266 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1267 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1268 every 30 minutes.</p>
1270 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1271 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1273 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1274 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1275 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1276 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1277 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1279 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1280 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1283 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1286 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1287 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1288 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1291 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
1292 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1295 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1296 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1297 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1298 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1300 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1301 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1302 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1304 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1305 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1306 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1308 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1309 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1310 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1311 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1313 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1314 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1315 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1316 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1317 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1318 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1319 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1320 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1322 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1323 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1327 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1330 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1331 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1332 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1333 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1334 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1335 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1336 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1337 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1338 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1339 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1343 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1345 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1346 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1347 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1348 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1351 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1352 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1353 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1354 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1355 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1356 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1359 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1360 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1361 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1362 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1363 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1364 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1366 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1367 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1368 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1371 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1372 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1373 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1374 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1375 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1376 at start of a text line.</p>
1378 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1381 <h3>qmail as your local SMTP server</h3>
1383 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
1384 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
1386 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1387 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1389 (This information contributed by Robert de Bath
1390 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1392 <h3>qmail as your ISP's POP3 server</h3>
1394 <p>Note that qmail's POP3 server, as of version 1.03 and netqmail 1.05,
1395 miscalculates the message sizes, so you may see size-related fetchmail
1398 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package, then it is usually possible
1399 to set up one fetchmail link to reliably collect the mail for an entire
1402 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1403 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1404 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1405 on this line. One major reason for this is to prevent mail
1406 loops, the other is to transport envelope information which is essential
1407 for multidrop (domain-in-a-mailbox) schemes.</p>
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.example.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1417 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.example.com
1420 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1423 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.example.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 '<code>envelope "Delivered-To"</code>' is in the fetchmail
1435 <li>Ensure the option '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' is
1436 in the fetchmail config file, in order to remove this prefix from the
1437 username. (added by Luca Olivetti)</li>
1439 <li>Ensure you have a <code>localdomains</code> option containing
1440 '<code>userdom.example.com</code>' or '<code>userhost.userdom.example.com</code>'
1444 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1447 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1449 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1450 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1451 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1452 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1453 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1455 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1456 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1457 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1460 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1463 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1465 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1466 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1467 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1468 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1469 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1470 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1472 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1473 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1474 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1475 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1478 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1479 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1480 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1484 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1487 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1488 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1489 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1490 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1492 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1495 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1496 work fine out of the box.</p>
1498 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1499 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1500 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1501 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1502 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1505 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1506 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1507 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1508 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1509 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1510 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1511 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1513 <p>You may also need to say
1514 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1515 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1516 recipient addresses.</p>
1518 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1521 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1522 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1524 href="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1525 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1528 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1531 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1532 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1533 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1535 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1538 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1539 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1540 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1542 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1544 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1546 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1549 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
1550 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1553 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3
1554 servers, and is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some
1555 problems which fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a
1556 href="#G8">IMAP</a> instead if at all possible. If you must talk to
1557 qpopper, here are some problems to be aware of:</p>
1559 <h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
1562 href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a> reports
1563 that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper 2.5.3
1564 under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to 2.0.35.
1565 When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3, fetchmail
1566 will hang with a socket error.</p>
1568 <p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of
1569 some problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission
1570 pattern is tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also
1571 displays the hang but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The
1572 problem can also be banished by <a
1573 href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to
1574 qpopper 3.0b1</a>.</p>
1576 <h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
1578 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
1579 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a
1580 href="#X5">X5</a> for details. The solution is to upgrade your
1583 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1586 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1587 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1588 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1589 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1590 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1591 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1593 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1594 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1595 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1597 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1598 with M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with
1599 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1600 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1601 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1604 <p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1605 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1606 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1607 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1610 <p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
1611 features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1612 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1613 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1614 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1615 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1616 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1618 <p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
1619 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1622 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1623 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1626 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1627 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1630 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1632 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1634 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1636 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1639 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1641 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1643 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1645 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1646 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1648 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1650 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1651 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1654 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1656 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1659 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1662 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1663 System\Pop3 Performance
1667 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1669 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1670 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1672 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1673 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1674 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1676 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1678 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1682 <p>The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me
1683 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1686 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1687 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1688 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1690 <p>This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to
1691 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1692 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1693 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1694 name from your username.</p>
1696 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1697 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1698 username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame,
1699 almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in
1702 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1705 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1706 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1708 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1709 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1712 <p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
1713 ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
1714 Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris
1717 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1720 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1721 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1722 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1723 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1724 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1725 Resent- headers.</p>
1727 <p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to
1728 get a POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead.
1729 OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1732 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1733 command fails, returning only one line regrardless of its argument,
1734 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1736 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1738 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named
1739 GroupFoolish; it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably
1740 broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required content
1741 length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1743 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend
1744 voting with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you
1745 stick with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will
1746 probably pay for it with other problems.</p>
1748 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1749 InterChange?</a></h2>
1751 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1752 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server;
1753 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1754 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1756 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing
1757 me that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this
1758 problem. I don't have any reports one way or the other yet.</p>
1760 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1762 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1763 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1764 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1766 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1767 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1768 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1769 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1770 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1772 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1774 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1775 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1776 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1780 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h1>
1781 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1783 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1784 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1785 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1786 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1787 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1788 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1791 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1792 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1793 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1794 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1795 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1796 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1797 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1798 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1799 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1801 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1802 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1804 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1805 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1808 # This version will use RPA
1809 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1810 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1811 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1813 # This version will not use RPA
1814 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1815 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1816 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1819 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1820 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1822 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1824 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1825 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1826 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1827 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1829 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1830 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1831 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1834 set postmaster "philh"
1835 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1836 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1839 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1841 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1842 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1843 maildrop, like this:</p>
1846 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1847 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1850 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1851 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1852 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1853 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1854 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1855 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1856 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1859 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1860 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1864 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1865 30 days old; see their <a
1866 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/producthelp/mail/sdps-tech.html/">POP3
1867 page</a> for details.</p>
1869 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1871 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1872 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1873 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1874 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1876 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1877 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1878 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1879 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1882 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1883 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1884 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1887 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1888 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1889 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1891 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1894 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1895 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1896 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1897 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1898 certainly a server bug.</p>
1900 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1901 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1902 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1903 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1904 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1905 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1907 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1908 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1909 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1911 <p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's
1912 servers. They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding
1913 another provider.)</p>
1915 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1916 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1918 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1919 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1920 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1921 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1922 any of the following headers.</p>
1924 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "--mda" switch:</p>
1927 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1930 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1932 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1933 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1934 already been read.</p>
1936 <p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
1937 Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.</p>
1939 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1941 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1942 webmail with the help of the <a
1943 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1944 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1945 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1946 configuration should look like this:</p>
1949 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1950 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1951 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
1955 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
1956 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
1958 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1960 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1961 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1962 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
1964 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
1965 as the only appropriate response.</p>
1967 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1968 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1969 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
1972 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1974 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
1975 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
1976 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
1977 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
1980 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or
1981 other Maillennium servers?</a></h2>
1983 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a
1984 Maillennium POP3/PROXY server... <em>but</em> this server will
1985 truncate "TOP" responses after 64 - 82 kB (we have varying reports),
1986 in violation of Internet Standard #53 aka. RFC-1939 (POP3). Don't
1987 mistake this for a fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.) Comcast
1988 documented they haven't understood what this is about in <a
1989 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2004-April/008523.html">two
1990 messages from April 2004.</a></p>
1992 <p>Beginning with version 6.3.2, fetchmail will fall back to the RETR
1993 command if the greeting string contains "Maillennium POP3/PROXY server",
1994 and print a warning message. This means however that fetchmail has no
1995 means to prevent the "seen" flag from being set on the server (Note that
1996 officially, POP3 has no notion of seen tracking, but it works for some
1999 <p>Workaround for older versions: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
2002 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
2004 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
2006 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports
2007 linking with socks library. If you specify the value of this option
2008 as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2009 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2010 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2012 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may
2013 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2015 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2018 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2019 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2022 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2024 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/</a></p>
2026 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2031 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2032 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2035 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2038 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2042 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2045 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2046 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2047 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2048 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2049 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2050 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2051 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2052 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2054 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2055 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2056 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2057 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2059 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2060 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2062 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2063 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos
2064 V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2065 IMAP server. UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
2066 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
2067 is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for
2068 other reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and
2069 it has to have GSS support compiled in.</p>
2071 <p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by
2072 default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
2073 distribution (available via FTP at <a
2074 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
2075 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2076 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2077 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2078 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2079 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2081 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2082 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2083 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2084 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2085 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2086 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2087 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2089 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2090 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2091 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2092 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2093 Kerberos principal.</p>
2095 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2096 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2098 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2101 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2102 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed.
2103 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2104 installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl) ths will
2105 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2106 you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after an
2109 <p>Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek
2110 under OpenSSL versions 0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally
2111 tripped over, causing hangs. It is recommended that you install
2114 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2115 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2116 SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2117 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2118 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2120 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2121 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2122 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2123 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2124 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2125 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2127 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2128 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2129 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2130 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2132 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2133 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work:</p>
2136 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2137 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2140 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2141 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2142 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2143 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2144 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2146 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2147 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2148 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2149 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2150 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2151 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2153 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2154 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2155 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2158 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2159 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2160 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2161 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2162 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2163 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2166 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2170 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2171 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2174 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2175 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2178 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2179 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2180 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2181 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2182 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2183 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2184 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2186 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2187 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2188 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2189 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2190 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2193 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2194 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar
2195 ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2198 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2199 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2200 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2201 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2203 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2204 if the server advertises it?</a></h2>
2206 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2207 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2208 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2209 his certificates properly.</p>
2211 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2212 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2214 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2216 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2217 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2218 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2219 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2222 <h1>Runtime fatal errors</h1>
2223 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2224 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2226 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2227 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2229 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2230 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2231 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2232 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2233 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2235 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2236 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2237 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2239 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2240 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2241 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2242 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2243 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2244 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2245 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2247 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2248 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2249 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2251 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2252 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2253 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2254 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2255 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2256 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2258 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2259 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2260 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2261 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2263 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2264 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2265 than one IP address.</p>
2267 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2268 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2269 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2275 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2276 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2277 Make sure it says something like</p>
2283 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2286 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2287 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2288 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2289 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2290 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2292 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2293 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2294 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2295 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2297 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2298 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2299 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2301 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2302 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2304 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2305 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2307 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2308 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2309 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2310 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2312 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2313 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2314 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2317 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2318 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2320 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2321 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2322 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2323 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2325 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2327 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2328 href="http://flex.sourceforge.net/">flex</a>.</p>
2330 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2331 operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
2333 <p>We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and
2334 gcc-2.7.2. It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier
2337 <p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library
2340 <p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
2341 version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
2342 calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
2343 Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
2344 calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself,
2345 not the fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an
2346 fclose called directly by fetchmail, either).</p>
2348 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2349 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2352 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2353 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2354 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2355 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2356 reportt no problem.</p>
2358 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2359 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2360 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2361 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2363 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2364 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2367 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2370 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2371 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2372 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2373 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2374 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2375 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2377 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2380 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2381 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2382 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2383 are option values that work:</p>
2390 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2391 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2392 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2393 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2394 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2395 corresponding IP address.</p>
2397 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2398 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2400 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2401 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2402 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2403 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2406 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2407 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2409 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2410 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2414 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2415 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2416 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2417 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2418 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2420 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2421 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2422 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2423 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2426 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2428 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2429 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2433 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2436 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2437 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2438 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2439 packet-fragmentation problem, that's where you'll see it.</p>
2441 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2444 <p>This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your
2445 MDA is croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove
2446 the <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP
2449 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
2450 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
2451 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
2452 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
2453 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
2454 at start of a text line.</p>
2456 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2457 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2459 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2460 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2462 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2463 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2464 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2465 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2466 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2467 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2468 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2469 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2470 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table
2471 summary="Common port addresses for IMAP, POP3 and their SSL
2473 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2474 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2475 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2476 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2477 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2481 <h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
2482 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2485 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2486 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2487 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2489 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2492 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2493 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2496 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2499 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2500 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2501 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2502 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2504 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2507 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2509 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2511 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2519 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2522 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2526 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2529 <p>For more details consult the file
2530 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2532 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2535 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2536 but hangs returning:</p>
2539 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2540 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2541 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2542 .......fetchmail: flushed
2543 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2544 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2547 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2550 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2554 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
2555 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2556 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2558 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2559 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2561 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2562 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2563 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2565 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2566 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2568 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2572 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2575 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2577 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2578 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2580 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2581 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2582 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2583 also truncates long lines at column 1024)</p>
2585 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2586 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it
2587 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2588 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2590 <p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to
2591 restore the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If
2592 you have one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a
2593 small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP
2594 connects to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes
2595 to the queue more often.</p>
2597 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better
2598 behaved. If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all
2599 DELE commands as though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical
2600 violation of the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky
2601 phone lines). Then it will re-queue any message that was being
2602 downloaded at hangup time. Still, qpopper may require a noticeable
2603 amount of time to do deletions and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail
2604 waits a bit before retrying in order to avoid a 'lock busy'
2607 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2608 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2610 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2611 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2612 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2613 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2614 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2616 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2617 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2618 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2619 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2620 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2621 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2622 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2624 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2627 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a>
2631 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems</h1>
2632 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2633 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2635 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2636 recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
2637 matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
2638 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2639 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2640 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2642 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration
2643 problem either on the server or your client machine.</p>
2645 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2646 necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
2647 mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2648 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be
2649 uncollected if it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you
2650 don't have listed).</p>
2652 <p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can
2653 hurt you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
2654 intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the
2657 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2658 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2660 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2661 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2663 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2664 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2665 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2666 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2668 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2669 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2670 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2671 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2672 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2673 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2675 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2676 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2677 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2678 MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
2679 is with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2681 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2684 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2685 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2687 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2688 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2689 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2690 multidrop routing.</p>
2692 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2694 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2695 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2696 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2697 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2699 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2700 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2701 that is useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set
2702 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2703 bamboozled by this.</p>
2705 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2706 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2709 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2710 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2712 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2713 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2714 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2715 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2717 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2718 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2720 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2721 having DNS problems.</a></h2>
2723 <p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
2724 href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the
2725 reference to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently
2726 in some older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version
2729 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2730 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2731 won't be, and this problem should go away.</p>
2733 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2734 message is processed.</a></h2>
2736 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2737 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2738 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2741 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2742 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2743 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2745 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2746 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2747 address is valid.</p>
2749 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2750 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2752 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2753 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2754 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2755 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2756 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2758 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2759 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2762 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2764 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2765 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2766 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2769 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2772 #############################################
2773 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2774 #############################################
2776 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2778 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2779 ---------------------------
2781 -------------------------
2782 # handle virtual users
2784 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2785 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2786 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2787 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2788 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2791 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2792 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2793 work. Michael says:</p>
2795 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2796 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2797 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2800 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2801 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2803 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2804 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2805 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2808 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2810 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2811 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2812 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2813 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2815 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2816 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2817 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2818 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2819 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2821 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2823 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2826 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2827 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2828 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2831 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2832 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2833 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2834 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2835 as an alias of your server.</p>
2837 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2840 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2841 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2842 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2843 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2844 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2846 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2847 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2848 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2849 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2850 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2851 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2854 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2855 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2856 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2857 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2861 <h1>Mangled mail</h1>
2862 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2863 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2865 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2866 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2867 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2868 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2869 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2871 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2872 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2873 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2874 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2875 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as maildrop) and
2876 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2878 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2881 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2882 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2883 the server and choked on by an old version of
2884 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2886 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2887 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2888 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2889 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2891 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of
2892 line are being split.</a></h2>
2894 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2895 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2896 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2899 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2900 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2901 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2902 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2904 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2905 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2906 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2909 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2910 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2911 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2912 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2913 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2914 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2915 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2916 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2918 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2919 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2922 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2925 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2926 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2927 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2928 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2930 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2931 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2932 different way</a></h2>
2934 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2935 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2936 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2937 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
2940 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
2941 order they pass your mail:</p>
2944 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
2946 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
2948 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
2950 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
2952 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2953 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
2956 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
2957 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
2958 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
2959 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
2960 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
2962 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
2963 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
2964 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
2967 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2970 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
2971 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
2972 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
2973 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
2974 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
2975 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
2977 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
2978 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
2979 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
2980 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
2981 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
2983 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
2984 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
2985 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
2986 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
2987 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
2988 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
2989 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
2991 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
2992 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
2993 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
2994 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
2995 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
2996 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
2997 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
2998 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
2999 actual password.</p>
3001 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
3002 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
3003 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
3004 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
3005 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
3006 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
3007 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
3008 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
3009 operating system.</p>
3011 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
3012 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
3013 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
3014 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
3015 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
3016 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
3018 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3019 fetching too much!</a></h2>
3021 <p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before
3022 4.4.8. Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than
3023 RETR, in order to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen
3024 is helpful for later recovery if you lose your connection in the
3025 middle of a retrieval).</p>
3027 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
3028 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP
3029 bounds check was fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP
3030 argument. Decrementing the TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.</p>
3032 <p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.</p>
3034 <p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
3035 this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.</p>
3037 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3038 or mangled.</a></h2>
3040 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3041 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3042 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3043 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3044 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3046 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3047 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3048 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3049 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3050 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3051 only effective solution.</p>
3053 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3054 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3055 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3058 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3059 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3060 you're having this problem. The <a
3061 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3064 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3065 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3068 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3069 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3070 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3071 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3074 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3075 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3076 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3077 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3078 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3079 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3080 generates different Boundary tags for each part, .e.g. one tag is
3081 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3082 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3083 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3084 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3086 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3087 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3088 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3089 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3090 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3091 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3093 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3094 attachments is the <a
3095 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3097 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3098 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3099 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3100 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3101 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3104 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3105 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3106 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3107 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3110 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3115 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3116 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3117 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3118 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3120 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3123 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3124 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3128 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3129 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3130 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3131 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3132 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3133 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3134 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3135 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3136 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3137 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3138 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3139 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3140 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3142 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3145 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3147 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3149 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3151 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3152 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3154 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3156 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3159 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3160 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3161 internet interoperability.</p>
3163 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3164 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3165 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3166 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3167 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3168 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3169 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3170 mailtool's format.</p>
3172 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3175 <p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know
3176 anything about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any
3177 differently from plain message data.</p>
3179 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3180 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3181 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3182 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3183 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3184 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3185 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3186 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3188 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3189 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3190 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3191 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3192 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3193 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3195 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3198 <p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
3199 Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3200 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%.
3201 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3202 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3205 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3206 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3209 <p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3210 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3211 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</p>
3213 <p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3214 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3215 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3216 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3217 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3218 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3221 <p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3222 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3223 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3224 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3232 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p>
3234 <p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3235 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.</p>
3237 <p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3238 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3239 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</p>
3241 <p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
3242 href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.</p>
3244 <h2><a id="X9" name="X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
3245 with Domino IMAP</a></h2>
3247 <p>Domino 6 IMAP was found by Anthony Kim in February 2006 to
3248 erroneously omit the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header in messages
3249 downloaded through IMAP, causing messages to display improperly. This
3250 happened with Domino's incoming mail format configured to "Prefers
3251 MIME". Solution: switch Domino to "Keep in Sender's format".</p>
3254 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2006-March/010015.html">Anthony
3259 <h1>Other problems</h1>
3260 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3261 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3263 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3264 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3265 the log, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To
3266 get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3267 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it
3268 already exists).</p>
3270 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message
3271 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3273 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3274 which Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of
3275 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3276 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3282 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3288 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3289 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3290 /etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.</p>
3292 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3305 to solve the problem system-wide.
3307 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3308 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3310 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3311 your rc file and restart, reading it.</p>
3313 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3314 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3316 <p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an
3317 IMAP with a long expunge interval.</p>
3319 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3320 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3321 fix this, because doing it right takes cooperation from the server.
3322 There are two possible remedies:</p>
3324 <p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
3325 the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
3326 doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as
3327 well as on processing a QUIT command.</p>
3329 <p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
3330 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
3331 command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages
3332 immediately after they are downloaded.</p>
3334 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3335 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3336 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3337 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3339 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3340 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3342 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3343 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3346 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3347 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3348 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3349 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3350 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3352 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3353 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3354 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3356 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3357 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3358 the log will look right.</p>
3360 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3361 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3363 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3364 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3366 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3367 to fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
3368 <code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
3369 fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>,
3370 and that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably
3371 also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.</p>
3373 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by
3374 reconfiguring with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3376 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3377 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3378 Switching to a faster MTA like <a
3379 href="http://www.postfix.org/">Postfix</a> might help.</p>
3381 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3382 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3384 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3387 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3388 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3389 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3391 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3392 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3393 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3394 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3395 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3398 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3400 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3401 option working?</a></h2>
3403 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3404 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3405 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3406 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3407 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3408 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3409 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3410 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3412 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3413 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3415 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3416 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3417 turn <cite>keep</cite> off.</p>
3419 <p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL
3420 feature that can lead to all your old messages being seen again
3421 after a line drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL
3422 code breaks worse every time I touch it. The problem is
3423 fundamental; maintaining and garbage-collecting the right kind of
3424 client-side state is just hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and
3425 removed LAST should be hung up by his thumbs and whipped with
3426 scorpions. The right answers are either (a) live with the
3427 occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4, or (c) fix the code
3428 yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose (c), I don't want
3429 to hear about it.</p>
3431 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3432 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3433 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3434 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3435 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3436 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3437 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3439 <p>James Stevens <James.Stevens at kyzo.com> writes:</p>
3441 <p><em>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from
3442 an NT POP3 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting
3443 each e-mail one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very
3444 unreliable and would often just drop out in the middle of a
3447 <p><em>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated
3448 normally (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll
3449 back all the deletes !!!</em></p>
3451 <p><em>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just
3452 end up continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or,
3453 if the queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
3454 connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back
3455 any deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the
3456 first few e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became
3457 fuller and fuller the chances of getting a connection long enough
3458 to collect theentire mailbox became smaller and smaller.</em></p>
3460 <p><em>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5
3461 or 10) e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3
3462 connection is terminated correctly.</em></p>
3464 <p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
3465 to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
3466 switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.</p>
3468 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my
3469 messages the same?</a></h2>
3471 <p>This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking
3472 the received date from the last Received header.</p>
3474 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3475 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3477 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.</p>
3479 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3480 get the message only once per run.</p>
3482 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3483 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3485 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3487 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3489 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3490 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3491 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3492 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3494 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3496 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3497 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3498 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3499 your local server is.</p>
3501 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>.</p>
3503 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3506 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3508 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3510 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3511 does something like "date >> $HOME/Procmail/fetchmail.log".</p>
3513 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3516 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> (available since release 6.3.0) to
3517 delete oversized mails along with the <code>--limit</code> option. If
3518 you are already having <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete
3519 oversized mails, <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to
3520 avoid losing mails unintentionally.</p>
3522 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3523 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3524 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3525 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3526 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3527 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3528 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3530 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3533 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3534 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3535 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3536 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3537 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3538 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3543 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3544 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3545 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3546 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3547 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3548 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3551 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3552 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3553 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3554 with the data reset to initial values.
3558 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3559 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3560 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3561 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3563 <h2><a name="O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
3564 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter format?</a></h2>
3566 <p>All the world uses ISO-216:1975 "A4" paper except for North America.
3567 Using A4 format reaches far more people than (formerly known as DIN A4,
3568 from DIN 476) format. Besides that, A4 paper <em>is</em> available in North
3570 For further information on the Letter-vs-A4 story, see:</p>
3571 <ul><li><a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html">Markus
3572 Kuhn: "International standard paper sizes"</a></li>
3574 href="http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/">Brian
3575 Forte: "A4 vs US Letter"</a></li></ul>
3577 <p>Offering the document formatted for two different paper sizes would
3578 bloat the package beyond reason, and formatting in a way that fits A4
3579 and Letter paper formats would be a waste of paper in most parts of the
3580 world. For that reason, fetchmail only ships with an A4 formatted PDF
3583 <p>To create a letter-sized PDF, install <a
3584 href="http://www.htmldoc.org/">HTMLDOC</a>, edit
3585 <code>fetchmail-FAQ.book</code> in the source directory with your
3586 favorite text editor, replace <samp>--size A4</samp> by <samp>--size
3587 letter</samp>, and type:
3590 make fetchmail-FAQ.pdf
3595 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
3597 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
3599 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
3604 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3605 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3606 Matthias Andree</address>