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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>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
51 <h2>General problems</h2>
53 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br/>
54 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br/>
55 <a href="#G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
56 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br/>
57 <a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like Outlook Express.</a><br/>
58 <a href="#G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br/>
59 <a href="#G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br/>
60 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
61 <a href="#G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
62 <a href="#G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br/>
63 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a><br/>
64 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br/>
65 <a href="#G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br/>
66 <a href="#G14">G14. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br/>
67 <a href="#G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br/>
68 <a href="#G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br/>
71 <h2>Build-time problems</h2>
73 <a href="#B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</strike></a><br/>
74 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br/>
75 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br/>
76 <a href="#B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a><br/>
78 <h2>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h2>
80 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br/>
81 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br/>
82 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a><br/>
83 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br/>
85 <h2>Configuration questions</h2>
87 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root
88 on my own machine?</a><br/>
89 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get
90 killed when I log out?</a><br/>
91 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use
92 with --interface?</a><br/>
93 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam
95 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
96 often than others?</a><br/>
97 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not
98 from an init script.</a><br/>
99 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
103 <h2>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h2>
105 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br/>
106 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br/>
107 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br/>
108 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br/>
109 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br/>
110 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br/>
111 <a href="#T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a><br/>
112 <a href="#T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a><br/>
114 <h2>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h2>
116 <a href="#S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a><br/>
117 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br/>
118 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br/>
119 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br/>
120 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br/>
121 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br/>
122 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br/>
124 <h2>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h2>
126 <a href="#I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br/>
127 <a href="#I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br/>
128 <a href="#I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br/>
129 <a href="#I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br/>
130 <a href="#I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a><br/>
131 <a href="#I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br/>
132 <a href="#I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br/>
133 <a href="#I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?</a><br/>
135 <h2>How to set up well-known security and authentication
138 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br/>
139 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br/>
140 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br/>
141 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br/>
142 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br/>
143 <a href="#K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to try TLS if the server
144 advertises it?</a><br/>
146 <h2>Runtime fatal errors</h2>
148 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows 'SMTP
149 connect failed' messages.</a><br/>
150 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't
152 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
154 <a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
155 normally otherwise.</a><br/>
156 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
158 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
159 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after
160 an OS upgrade</a><br/>
161 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
162 messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
163 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
164 <a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br/>
165 <a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
166 <a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
169 <h2>Hangs and lockups</h2>
171 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
172 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
174 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
177 <h2>Disappearing mail</h2>
179 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
180 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
181 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
183 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
184 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
187 <h2>Multidrop-mode problems</h2>
189 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
190 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
191 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
192 domain properly.</a><br/>
193 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
194 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
195 <a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
197 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
199 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
201 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
202 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
203 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
207 <h2>Mangled mail</h2>
209 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
210 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
211 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
213 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
214 being split.</a><br/>
215 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
217 <a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
219 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
221 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
223 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
226 <h2>Other problems</h2>
228 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
229 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
230 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
231 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
232 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
234 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
235 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
236 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
237 not the real From address?</a><br/>
238 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
239 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
240 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
242 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
244 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
245 messages over and over?</a><br/>
246 <a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
248 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
249 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
250 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
251 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
252 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
254 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
259 <h1>General problems</h1>
260 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
263 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
264 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
265 intermittent PPP or SLIP connection to a remote mailserver. It can
266 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards via port
267 25 to the local SMTP listener, enabling all the normal
268 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local
269 mail or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
271 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
272 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
273 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
274 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
275 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
276 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
278 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
279 software. The openness of the sources is the strongest assurance of
280 quality you can have. Extensive peer review by a large,
281 multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as near
282 bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.</p>
284 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
285 href="http://gnu.org//copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
288 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
289 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
291 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
292 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
294 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
295 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
296 href="http://fetchmail.berlios.de/">http://fetchmail.berlios.de/</a>.
297 You can also usually find both in the <a
298 href="http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.html">
299 POP mail tools directory on Sunsite</a>.</p>
301 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
302 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
303 may not be completely current.</p>
305 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix
308 <p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
309 fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
310 save us both time if you upgrade and test with <a href="#G2">the latest
311 version</a> <em>before</em> sending in a bug report.</p>
313 <p>I will fix bugs, provided you include enough diagnostic information
314 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
315 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
316 When reporting bugs, please include the following:</p>
319 <li>Your operating system.</li>
321 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
322 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
325 <li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.</li>
327 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
330 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
332 <li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
333 command-line options you used.</li>
336 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
337 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
338 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
340 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
341 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
342 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
343 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
344 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
345 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
346 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
347 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
348 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
349 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
350 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
351 introduced -- and with information like that, I can usually come up
352 with a fix very quickly.</p>
354 <p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to
355 test for IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe
356 function of fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf
357 doesn't tell you it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak,
358 poorly-designed protocol with chronic problems, and the later
359 versions after RFC1725 actually get worse rather than better.
360 Changing over to IMAP4 may well make your problem go away -- and if
361 your ISP doesn't have IMAP4 support, bug them to supply it.</p>
363 <p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
364 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
365 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
366 the passwords first!</p>
368 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
369 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
370 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
371 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
372 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
373 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
374 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
375 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
377 <p>A transcript of the failed session with -v -v (yes, that's
378 <em>two</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost always be
379 useful. It is very important that the transcript include your
380 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of
381 server problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords,
382 which are specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be
385 <p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should
386 include session transcripts with -v -v of both the working and
387 failing versions. Very often, the source of the problem can
388 instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
391 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
392 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
393 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
394 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
397 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
400 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
403 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
404 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
406 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed very quickly,
407 often within 48 hours. Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If
408 the solution isn't obvious when I first look, it may evade me for a
409 long time (or to put it another way, fetchmail is well enough
410 tested that the easy bugs have long since been found). So if you
411 want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just sufficient but nearly
412 <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to reproduce it.</p>
414 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
415 Will you add it?</a></h2>
417 <p>If it's reasonable for fetchmail and cannot be solved with reasonable
418 effort outside of fetchmail, perhaps.</p>
420 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
421 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
422 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
423 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
424 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
426 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
427 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
428 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
429 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
431 <p>fetchmail's first job is transport though, and it should do this
432 well. If a feature would cause fetchmail to deteriorate in other
433 respects, the feature will probably not be added.</p>
435 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
436 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
437 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
438 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
439 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
440 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
442 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like
443 Outlook Express.</a></h2>
445 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
446 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
447 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
448 <code>keep</code> option as a sort of poor man's newsgroup
449 facility. Microsoft's Outlook Express supports this.</p>
451 <p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
452 spare time of developers permitting.</p>
454 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
457 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list (fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de)
458 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
459 fetchmail. It's a Mailman list, see <a
460 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>.</p>
461 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
462 (fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de) for people who want to discuss
463 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
464 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
465 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.
466 There is also an announcements-only list,
467 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de, which you can sign up for at <a
468 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
470 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
471 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
473 <p>The fetchmail development was also a sociological experiment, an
474 extended test to see if my theory about the critical features of
475 the Linux development model is correct.</p>
477 <p>The experiment was a success. I wrote a paper about it titled <a
478 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
479 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
480 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
481 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
482 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
483 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape tell me it helped
485 href="http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
486 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
488 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
489 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
491 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
494 <p>The short answer: IMAP 2000 running over Unix.</p>
496 <p>Here's a longer answer:</p>
498 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
499 that conforms to the relevant RFCs (and even some outright broken
500 ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
501 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works
502 equally well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers
503 without LAST, limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways
504 described on the manual page.</p>
506 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
507 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
508 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
509 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by running
510 fetchmail in AUTO mode, or by using the 'Probe for supported
511 protocols' function in the fetchmailconf utility).</p>
513 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
514 IMAP4rev1 server; it has the best facilities for tracking message
515 'seen' states. It also recovers from interrupted connections more
516 gracefully than POP3, and enables some significant performance
517 optimizations. The new <a
518 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.tar.Z">IMAP 2000</a>
519 is particularly nice, as it supports CRAM-MD5 so you don't have to
520 ship your mail password over the net en clair (fetchmail
521 autodetects this capability). Older versions had support for GSSAPI
522 giving a similar effect.</p>
524 <p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just
525 plain broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle
526 the sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even
527 Microsoft itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail
528 service runs over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John
529 Kirch's excellent <a href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white
530 paper</a> on Unix vs. NT performance.</p>
532 <p>Source for a high-quality supported implementation of POP is
533 available from the <a
534 href="ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/">Eudora
535 FTP site</a>. Don't use 2.5, which has a rather restrictive
536 license. The 2.5.2 version appears to restore the open-source
537 license of previous versions.</p>
539 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
540 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
542 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
543 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
544 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
545 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
546 popular Unix mail agents -- <a
547 href="http://www.myxa.com/old/elm.html">elm</a>, <a
548 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
549 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
550 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> -- will work fine with
553 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
554 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. My own personal
555 mail setup is sendmail plus fetchmail plus mutt. Mutt's interface
556 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
557 elm, but its excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it in a class
558 by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though; most
559 of the mutt developers will cheerfully admit that fetchmail's is
562 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
565 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
566 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
569 <p>Most people use fetchmail over phone wires (whether plain old
570 copper or DSL), which are hard to tap. Anybody with the skill and
571 resources to do this could get into your server mailbox with much less
572 effort by subverting the server host. So if your provider setup is
573 phone-company wire going straight into a service box, you probably
574 don't need to worry.</p>
576 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
577 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
578 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
579 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
580 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
581 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
583 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
584 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
585 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
586 to use end-to-end encryption on your whole mail stream so none of
587 it can be read. One of the advantages of fetchmail over
588 conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able to arrange
589 this by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
591 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
592 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
593 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
594 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
595 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
596 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
598 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
599 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
600 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
601 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
604 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
605 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
606 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
607 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
610 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, you'll have CRAM-MD5
611 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
614 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
615 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
616 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
617 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
618 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
619 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
620 You can register a secret on the host (using
621 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like it). Specify the
622 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
623 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
624 back the the server for verification.</p>
626 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
627 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
628 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
631 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
632 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
633 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
634 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
635 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
636 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
639 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
640 use their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
641 href="#I1">I1</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
642 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
644 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
645 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
646 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
647 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
648 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
649 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
650 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
651 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
653 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
654 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
655 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
657 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
658 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
659 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
660 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
662 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
663 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
665 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
666 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
668 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
669 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT
670 TO address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
671 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
672 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
673 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
675 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
676 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
677 client machine had when it started up.</p>
679 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
680 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
681 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
682 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
683 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
684 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
686 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
687 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
688 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
689 or you can use the IP address itself).</p>
691 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
692 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
693 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
694 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
695 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
697 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
698 option when initially developing your poll configuration -- it's
699 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
700 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
701 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
704 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
705 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
706 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
707 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
708 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
709 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
710 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
713 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
714 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
715 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
716 not yet widely deployed, as of early 2001.</p>
718 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
719 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
720 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname your giving
721 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
722 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
723 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
730 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
733 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
736 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
737 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
738 mailhost.) See the <a
739 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
742 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
743 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
745 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
746 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
747 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
748 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
751 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
752 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
754 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
755 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
757 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
758 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
760 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
761 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
762 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
763 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
764 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
766 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
767 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
768 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
769 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
770 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
772 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
773 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
775 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
777 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
778 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
779 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
780 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
783 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
784 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
786 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
787 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
788 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
789 different problem.</p>
791 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
792 heavy loads?</a></h2>
794 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
795 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
796 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
797 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory.</p>
799 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
800 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
801 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
802 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
803 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
805 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
806 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
807 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
808 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
809 but not necessarily latency).</p>
812 <h1>Build-time problems</h1>
813 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
814 FreeBSD.</strike></a></h2>
816 <p style="font-style:italic;">As of release 6.3.0, fetchmail's
817 Makefile[.in] should work flawlessly with BSD's portable make used on
818 FreeBSD. With older releases, use GNU make (usually installed as
819 <code>gmake</code>).</p>
821 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
822 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
824 <p>fetchmail 6.3.0 and newer ship with the lexer and parser in .c
825 formats, so you do not need to use lex unless you hacked the .l or .y
828 <p>fetchmail's lexer has been developed with GNU flex, and the lex tools
829 shipped by some UNIX vendors (HP, SGI, Sun) are known to be incapable of
830 compiling fetchmail's lexer.</p>
832 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
833 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
835 <p>If you get errors resembling these:</p>
838 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
839 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
840 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
841 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
842 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
845 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
846 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
848 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
852 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
853 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
854 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
855 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
856 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
857 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
858 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
859 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
862 <p>install an up to date version of GNU gettext, reconfigure and rebuild
863 fetchmail. If that does not help, reconfigure with '--disable-nls' added
864 to the "./configure" command and rebuild.</p>
866 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
869 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
872 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h1>
873 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
874 longer work?</a></h2>
876 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
878 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
879 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
881 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
883 <p>The 'via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
884 gone. Use the %h feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
886 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
888 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
889 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
890 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
892 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
894 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
895 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
896 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
897 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
898 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
900 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
901 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
902 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
903 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
904 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
906 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
907 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
908 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
910 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
912 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
913 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
915 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
917 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
918 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
919 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
920 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
921 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
924 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
926 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
927 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
928 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
929 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
930 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
931 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
933 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
934 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
935 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
938 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
939 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
940 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
941 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
943 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
944 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
945 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
946 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
947 contact the maintainer.</p>
949 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
951 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
952 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
953 parser will utter a warning.</p>
955 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
957 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
958 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
959 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
960 attached to a server entry.</p>
962 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
963 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
964 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
967 poll openmail protocol pop3
968 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
971 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
972 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
975 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
976 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
978 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
980 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
981 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
983 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
984 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
985 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
987 <p>If you had something like</p>
990 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
993 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
994 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
995 'defaults' declaration.</p>
997 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
998 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1000 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1001 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1003 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1006 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1007 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1008 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1011 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1012 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1014 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1015 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1017 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1018 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1019 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1020 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1022 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1023 around your token.</p>
1025 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1026 don't understand.</a></h2>
1028 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1029 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1030 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1031 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1033 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1034 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1035 feature to work.</p>
1038 <h1>Configuration questions</h1>
1039 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1040 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1042 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1044 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1045 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1048 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1051 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1052 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1053 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1054 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1058 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1062 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1063 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1065 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1066 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1067 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1072 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1073 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1074 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1075 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1077 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1078 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1081 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1082 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1085 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1086 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1087 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1088 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1091 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1092 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1093 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1094 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1096 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1097 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1099 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1100 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1101 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1102 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1103 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1104 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1106 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1107 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1108 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1109 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1110 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1111 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1113 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1114 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1116 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1117 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1119 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1120 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1121 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1122 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1125 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1126 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1127 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1128 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1129 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1130 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1133 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1134 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1135 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1136 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1137 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1138 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1139 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1140 one secure link.</p>
1142 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1145 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1148 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1151 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1152 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1153 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1154 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1155 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1158 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1161 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1162 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1163 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1165 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1166 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1167 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1168 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1171 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1172 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1173 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1174 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1175 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1178 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1179 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1180 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1181 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1184 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1187 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1188 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1191 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1194 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1195 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1197 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1198 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1199 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1201 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1202 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1203 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1204 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1206 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1207 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1210 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1211 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1215 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1216 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1217 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1218 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1219 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti-spam.html">sendmail
1220 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1222 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1225 makemap hash deny <deny
1228 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1230 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1231 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1232 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1233 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1234 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1236 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1237 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1238 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1241 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1242 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1244 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1245 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1246 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1247 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1250 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1251 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1254 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1255 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1256 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1257 every 30 minutes.</p>
1259 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1260 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1262 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1263 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1264 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1265 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1266 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1268 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1269 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1272 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1275 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1276 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1277 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1280 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
1281 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1284 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1285 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1286 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1287 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1289 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1290 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1291 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1293 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1294 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1295 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1297 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1298 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1299 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1300 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1302 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1303 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1304 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1305 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1306 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1307 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1308 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1309 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1311 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1312 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1316 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1319 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1320 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1321 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1322 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1323 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1324 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1325 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1326 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1327 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1328 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1332 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1334 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1335 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1336 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1337 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1340 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1341 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1342 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1343 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1344 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1345 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1348 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1349 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1350 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1351 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1352 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1353 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1355 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1356 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1357 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1360 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1361 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1362 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1363 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1364 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1365 at start of a text line.</p>
1367 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1370 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1371 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1374 <p>(This information is thanks to Robert de Bath
1375 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1377 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package (see <a
1378 href="http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html">http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html</a>)
1379 then, providing the local hosts are also using qmail, it is
1380 possible to set up one fetchmail link to be reliably collect the
1381 mail for an entire domain.</p>
1383 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1384 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1385 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1386 on this line. The major reason for this is to prevent mail
1389 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site the
1390 ISP-mailhost will have normally put that site in its 'virtualhosts'
1391 control file so it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this
1392 site. This results in mail sent to
1393 'username@userhost.userdom.dom.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1397 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.dom.com
1400 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1403 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.dom.com
1406 <p>The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1407 but a string matching the user host name is likely.</p>
1409 <p>To use this line you must:</p>
1412 <li>Ensure the option 'envelope Delivered-To:' is in the fetchmail
1415 <li>Ensure you have a localdomains containing 'userdom.dom.com' or
1416 'userhost.dom.com' respectively.</li>
1419 <p>So far this reliably delivers messages to the correct machine of
1420 the local network, to deliver to the correct user the
1421 'mbox-userstr-' prefix must be stripped off of the user name. This
1422 can be done by setting up an alias within the qmail MTA on each
1423 local machine. Simply create a dot-qmail file called
1424 '.qmail-mbox-userstr-default' in the alias directory (normally
1425 /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:</p>
1428 | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"
1431 <p>Note this <em>does</em> require a modern /bin/sh.</p>
1433 <p>Peter Wilson adds:</p>
1435 <p>"My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means
1436 that I need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is
1437 due to qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is
1438 handled by the file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or
1439 ~user/.qmail-default)."</p>
1441 <p>Luca Olivetti adds:</p>
1443 <p>If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up
1444 the alias mechanism described above, you can use the option
1445 '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' in your fetchmail config
1446 file to strip the prefix from the local user name.</p>
1448 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1451 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1453 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1454 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1455 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1456 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1457 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1459 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1460 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1461 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1464 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1467 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1469 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1470 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1471 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1472 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1473 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1474 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1476 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1477 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1478 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1479 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1482 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1483 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1484 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1488 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1491 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1492 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1493 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1494 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1496 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1499 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1500 work fine out of the box.</p>
1502 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1503 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1504 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1505 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1506 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1509 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1510 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1511 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1512 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1513 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1514 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1515 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1517 <p>You may also need to say
1518 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1519 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1520 recipient addresses.</p>
1522 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1525 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1526 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1528 href="http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1529 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1532 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1535 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1536 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1537 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1539 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1542 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1543 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1544 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1546 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1548 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1550 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1553 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
1554 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1557 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3
1558 servers, and is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some
1559 problems which fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a
1560 href="#G8">IMAP</a> instead if at all possible. If you must talk to
1561 qpopper, here are some problems to be aware of:</p>
1563 <h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
1566 href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a> reports
1567 that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper 2.5.3
1568 under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to 2.0.35.
1569 When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3, fetchmail
1570 will hang with a socket error.</p>
1572 <p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of
1573 some problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission
1574 pattern is tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also
1575 displays the hang but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The
1576 problem can also be banished by <a
1577 href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to
1578 qpopper 3.0b1</a>.</p>
1580 <h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
1582 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
1583 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a
1584 href="#X5">X5</a> for details. The solution is to upgrade your
1587 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1590 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1591 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1592 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1593 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1594 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1595 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1597 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1598 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1599 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1601 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1602 with M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with
1603 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1604 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1605 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1608 <p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1609 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1610 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1611 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1614 <p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
1615 features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1616 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1617 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1618 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1619 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1620 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1622 <p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
1623 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1626 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1627 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1630 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1631 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1634 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1636 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1638 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1640 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1643 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1645 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1647 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1649 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1650 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1652 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1654 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1655 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1658 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1660 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1663 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1666 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1667 System\Pop3 Performance
1671 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1673 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1674 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1676 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1677 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1678 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1680 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1682 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1686 <p>The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me
1687 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1690 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1691 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1692 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1694 <p>This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to
1695 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1696 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1697 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1698 name from your username.</p>
1700 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1701 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1702 username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame,
1703 almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in
1706 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1709 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1710 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1712 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1713 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1716 <p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
1717 ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
1718 Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris
1721 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1724 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1725 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1726 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1727 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1728 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1729 Resent- headers.</p>
1731 <p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to
1732 get a POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead.
1733 OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1736 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1737 command fails, returning only one line regrardless of its argument,
1738 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1740 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1742 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named
1743 GroupFoolish; it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably
1744 broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required content
1745 length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1747 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend
1748 voting with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you
1749 stick with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will
1750 probably pay for it with other problems.</p>
1752 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1753 InterChange?</a></h2>
1755 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1756 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server;
1757 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1758 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1760 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing
1761 me that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this
1762 problem. I don't have any reports one way or the other yet.</p>
1764 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1766 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1767 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1768 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1770 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1771 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1772 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1773 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1774 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1776 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1778 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1779 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1780 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1784 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h1>
1785 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1787 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1788 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1789 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1790 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1791 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1792 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1795 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1796 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1797 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1798 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1799 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1800 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1801 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1802 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1803 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1805 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1806 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1808 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1809 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1812 # This version will use RPA
1813 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1814 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1815 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1817 # This version will not use RPA
1818 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1819 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1820 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1823 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1824 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1826 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1828 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1829 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1830 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1831 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1833 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1834 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1835 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1838 set postmaster "philh"
1839 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1840 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1843 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1845 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1846 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1847 maildrop, like this:</p>
1850 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1851 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1854 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1855 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1856 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1857 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1858 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1859 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1860 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1863 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1864 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1868 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1869 30 days old; see their <a
1870 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/products/mail/sdps-tech.shtml">POP3
1871 page</a> for details.</p>
1873 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1875 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1876 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1877 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1878 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1880 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1881 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1882 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1883 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1886 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1887 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1888 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1891 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1892 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1893 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1895 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1898 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1899 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1900 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1901 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1902 certainly a server bug.</p>
1904 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1905 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1906 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1907 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1908 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1909 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1911 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1912 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1913 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1915 <p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's
1916 servers. They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding
1917 another provider.)</p>
1919 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1920 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1922 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1923 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1924 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1925 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1926 any of the following headers.</p>
1928 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "--mda" switch:</p>
1931 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1934 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1936 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1937 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1938 already been read.</p>
1940 <p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
1941 Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.</p>
1943 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1945 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1946 webmail with the help of the <a
1947 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1948 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1949 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1950 configuration should look like this:</p>
1953 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1954 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1955 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
1959 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
1960 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
1962 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1964 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1965 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1966 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
1968 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
1969 as the only appropriate response.</p>
1971 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1972 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1973 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
1976 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1978 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
1979 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
1980 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
1981 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
1984 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?</a></h2>
1986 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a comcast.net server...<em>but</em>
1987 the Maillennium POP3 server comcat uses seems to have an 80K limit on
1988 the length of downloaded messages if you use POP3 TOP to retrieve.
1989 Anything larger is silently truncated. Don't mistake this for a
1990 fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.)</p>
1992 <p>Workaround: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1995 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
1997 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
1999 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports
2000 linking with socks library. If you specify the value of this option
2001 as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2002 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2003 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2005 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may
2006 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2008 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2011 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2012 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2015 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2017 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp</a></p>
2019 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2024 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2025 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2028 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2031 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2035 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2038 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2039 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2040 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2041 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2042 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2043 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2044 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2045 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2047 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2048 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2049 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2050 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2052 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2053 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2055 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2056 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos
2057 V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2058 IMAP server. UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
2059 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
2060 is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for
2061 other reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and
2062 it has to have GSS support compiled in.</p>
2064 <p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by
2065 default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
2066 distribution (available via FTP at <a
2067 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
2068 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2069 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2070 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2071 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2072 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2074 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2075 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2076 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2077 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2078 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2079 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2080 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2082 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2083 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2084 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2085 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2086 Kerberos principal.</p>
2088 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2089 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2091 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2094 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2095 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed.
2096 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2097 installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl) ths will
2098 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2099 you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after an
2102 <p>Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek
2103 under OpenSSL versions 0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally
2104 tripped over, causing hangs. It is recommended that you install
2107 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2108 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2109 SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2110 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2111 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2113 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2114 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2115 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2116 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2117 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2118 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2120 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2121 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2122 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2123 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2125 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2126 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work:</p>
2129 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2130 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2133 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2134 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2135 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2136 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2137 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2139 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2140 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2141 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2142 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2143 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2144 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2146 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2147 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2148 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2151 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2152 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2153 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2154 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2155 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2156 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2159 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2163 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2164 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2167 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2168 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2171 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2172 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2173 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2174 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2175 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2176 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2177 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2179 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2180 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2181 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2182 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2183 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2186 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2187 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar
2188 ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2191 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2192 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2193 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2194 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2196 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2197 if the server advertises it?</a></h2>
2199 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2200 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2201 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2202 his certificates properly.</p>
2204 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2205 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2207 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2209 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2210 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2211 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2212 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2215 <h1>Runtime fatal errors</h1>
2216 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2217 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2219 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2220 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2222 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2223 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2224 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2225 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2226 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2228 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2229 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2230 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2232 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2233 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2234 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2235 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2236 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2237 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2238 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2240 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2241 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2242 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2244 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2245 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2246 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2247 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2248 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2249 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2251 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2252 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2253 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2254 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2256 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2257 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2258 than one IP address.</p>
2260 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2261 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2262 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2268 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2269 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2270 Make sure it says something like</p>
2276 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2279 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2280 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2281 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2282 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2283 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2285 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2286 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2287 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2288 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2290 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2291 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2292 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2294 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2295 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2297 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2298 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2300 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2301 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2302 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2303 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2305 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2306 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2307 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2310 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2311 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2313 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2314 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2315 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2316 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2318 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2320 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2321 href="ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/~ftp/pub/gnu">flex</a> from the Free
2322 Software Foundation. An FSF <a
2323 href="http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/order/ftp.html">mirror site</a>
2324 will help you get it faster.</p>
2326 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2327 operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
2329 <p>We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and
2330 gcc-2.7.2. It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier
2333 <p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library
2336 <p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
2337 version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
2338 calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
2339 Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
2340 calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself,
2341 not the fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an
2342 fclose called directly by fetchmail, either).</p>
2344 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2345 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2348 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2349 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2350 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2351 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2352 reportt no problem.</p>
2354 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2355 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2356 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2357 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2359 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2360 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2363 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2366 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2367 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2368 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2369 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2370 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2371 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2373 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2376 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2377 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2378 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2379 are option values that work:</p>
2386 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2387 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2388 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2389 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2390 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2391 corresponding IP address.</p>
2393 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2394 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2396 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2397 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2398 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2399 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2402 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2403 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2405 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2406 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2410 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2411 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2412 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2413 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2414 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2416 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2417 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2418 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2419 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2422 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2424 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2425 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2429 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2432 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2433 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2434 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2435 packet-fragmentation problem, that's where you'll see it.</p>
2437 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2440 <p>This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your
2441 MDA is croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove
2442 the <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP
2445 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
2446 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
2447 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
2448 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
2449 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
2450 at start of a text line.</p>
2452 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2453 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2455 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2456 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2458 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2459 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2460 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2461 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2462 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2463 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2464 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2465 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2466 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table
2467 summary="Common port addresses for IMAP, POP3 and their SSL
2469 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2470 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2471 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2472 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2473 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2477 <h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
2478 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2481 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2482 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2483 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2485 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2488 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2489 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2492 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2495 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2496 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2497 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2498 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2500 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2503 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2505 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2507 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2515 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2518 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2522 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2525 <p>For more details consult the file
2526 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2528 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2531 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2532 but hangs returning:</p>
2535 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2536 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2537 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2538 .......fetchmail: flushed
2539 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2540 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2543 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2546 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2550 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
2551 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2552 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2554 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2555 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2557 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2558 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2559 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2561 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2562 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2564 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2568 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2571 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2573 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2574 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2576 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2577 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2578 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2579 also truncates long lines at column 1024)</p>
2581 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2582 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it
2583 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2584 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2586 <p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to
2587 restore the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If
2588 you have one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a
2589 small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP
2590 connects to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes
2591 to the queue more often.</p>
2593 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better
2594 behaved. If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all
2595 DELE commands as though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical
2596 violation of the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky
2597 phone lines). Then it will re-queue any message that was being
2598 downloaded at hangup time. Still, qpopper may require a noticeable
2599 amount of time to do deletions and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail
2600 waits a bit before retrying in order to avoid a 'lock busy'
2603 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2604 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2606 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2607 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2608 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2609 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2610 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2612 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2613 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2614 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2615 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2616 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2617 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2618 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2620 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2623 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a>
2627 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems</h1>
2628 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2629 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2631 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2632 recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
2633 matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
2634 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2635 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2636 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2638 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration
2639 problem either on the server or your client machine.</p>
2641 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2642 necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
2643 mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2644 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be
2645 uncollected if it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you
2646 don't have listed).</p>
2648 <p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can
2649 hurt you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
2650 intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the
2653 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2654 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2656 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2657 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2659 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2660 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2661 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2662 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2664 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2665 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2666 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2667 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2668 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2669 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2671 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2672 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2673 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2674 MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
2675 is with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2677 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2680 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2681 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2683 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2684 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2685 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2686 multidrop routing.</p>
2688 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2690 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2691 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2692 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2693 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2695 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2696 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2697 that is useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set
2698 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2699 bamboozled by this.</p>
2701 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2702 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2705 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2706 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2708 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2709 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2710 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2711 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2713 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2714 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2716 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2717 having DNS problems.</a></h2>
2719 <p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
2720 href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the
2721 reference to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently
2722 in some older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version
2725 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2726 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2727 won't be, and this problem should go away.</p>
2729 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2730 message is processed.</a></h2>
2732 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2733 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2734 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2737 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2738 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2739 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2741 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2742 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2743 address is valid.</p>
2745 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2746 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2748 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2749 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2750 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2751 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2752 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2754 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2755 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2758 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2760 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2761 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2762 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2765 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2768 #############################################
2769 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2770 #############################################
2772 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2774 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2775 ---------------------------
2777 -------------------------
2778 # handle virtual users
2780 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2781 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2782 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2783 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2784 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2787 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2788 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2789 work. Michael says:</p>
2791 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2792 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2793 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2796 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2797 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2799 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2800 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2801 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2804 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2806 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2807 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2808 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2809 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2811 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2812 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2813 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2814 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2815 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2817 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2819 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2822 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2823 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2824 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2827 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2828 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2829 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2830 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2831 as an alias of your server.</p>
2833 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2836 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2837 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2838 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2839 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2840 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2842 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2843 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2844 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2845 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2846 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2847 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2850 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2851 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2852 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2853 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2857 <h1>Mangled mail</h1>
2858 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2859 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2861 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2862 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2863 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2864 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2865 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2867 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2868 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2869 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2870 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2871 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as maildrop) and
2872 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2874 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2877 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2878 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2879 the server and choked on by an old version of
2880 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2882 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2883 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2884 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2885 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2887 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of
2888 line are being split.</a></h2>
2890 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2891 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2892 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2895 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2896 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2897 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2898 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2900 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2901 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2902 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2905 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2906 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2907 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2908 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2909 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2910 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2911 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2912 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2914 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2915 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2918 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2921 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2922 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2923 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2924 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2926 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2927 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2928 different way</a></h2>
2930 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2931 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2932 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2933 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
2936 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
2937 order they pass your mail:</p>
2940 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
2942 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
2944 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
2946 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
2948 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2949 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
2952 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
2953 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
2954 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
2955 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
2956 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
2958 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
2959 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
2960 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
2963 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2966 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
2967 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
2968 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
2969 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
2970 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
2971 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
2973 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
2974 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
2975 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
2976 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
2977 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
2979 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
2980 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
2981 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
2982 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
2983 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
2984 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
2985 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
2987 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
2988 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
2989 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
2990 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
2991 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
2992 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
2993 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
2994 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
2995 actual password.</p>
2997 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
2998 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
2999 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
3000 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
3001 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
3002 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
3003 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
3004 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
3005 operating system.</p>
3007 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
3008 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
3009 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
3010 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
3011 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
3012 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
3014 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3015 fetching too much!</a></h2>
3017 <p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before
3018 4.4.8. Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than
3019 RETR, in order to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen
3020 is helpful for later recovery if you lose your connection in the
3021 middle of a retrieval).</p>
3023 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
3024 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP
3025 bounds check was fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP
3026 argument. Decrementing the TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.</p>
3028 <p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.</p>
3030 <p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
3031 this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.</p>
3033 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3034 or mangled.</a></h2>
3036 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3037 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3038 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3039 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3040 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3042 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3043 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3044 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3045 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3046 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3047 only effective solution.</p>
3049 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3050 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3051 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3054 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3055 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3056 you're having this problem. The <a
3057 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3060 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3061 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3064 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3065 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3066 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3067 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3070 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3071 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3072 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3073 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3074 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3075 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3076 generates different Boundary tags for each part, .e.g. one tag is
3077 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3078 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3079 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3080 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3082 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3083 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3084 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3085 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3086 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3087 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3089 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3090 attachments is the <a
3091 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3093 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3094 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3095 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3096 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3097 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3100 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3101 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3102 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3103 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3106 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3111 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3112 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3113 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3114 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3116 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3119 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3120 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3124 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3125 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3126 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3127 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3128 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3129 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3130 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3131 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3132 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3133 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3134 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3135 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3136 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3138 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3141 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3143 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3145 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3147 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3148 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3150 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3152 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3155 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3156 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3157 internet interoperability.</p>
3159 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3160 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3161 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3162 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3163 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3164 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3165 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3166 mailtool's format.</p>
3168 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3171 <p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know
3172 anything about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any
3173 differently from plain message data.</p>
3175 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3176 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3177 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3178 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3179 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3180 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3181 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3182 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3184 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3185 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3186 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3187 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3188 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3189 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3191 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3194 <p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
3195 Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3196 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%.
3197 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3198 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3201 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3202 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3205 <p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3206 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3207 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</p>
3209 <p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3210 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3211 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3212 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3213 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3214 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3217 <p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3218 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3219 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3220 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3228 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p>
3230 <p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3231 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.</p>
3233 <p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3234 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3235 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</p>
3237 <p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
3238 href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.</p>
3241 <h1>Other problems</h1>
3242 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3243 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3245 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3246 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3247 the log, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To
3248 get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3249 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it
3250 already exists).</p>
3252 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message
3253 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3255 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3256 which Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of
3257 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3258 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3264 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3270 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3271 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3272 /etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.</p>
3274 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3287 to solve the problem system-wide.
3289 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3290 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3292 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3293 your rc file and restart, reading it.</p>
3295 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3296 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3298 <p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an
3299 IMAP with a long expunge interval.</p>
3301 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3302 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3303 fix this, because doing it right takes cooperation from the server.
3304 There are two possible remedies:</p>
3306 <p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
3307 the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
3308 doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as
3309 well as on processing a QUIT command.</p>
3311 <p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
3312 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
3313 command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages
3314 immediately after they are downloaded.</p>
3316 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3317 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3318 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3319 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3321 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3322 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3324 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3325 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3328 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3329 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3330 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3331 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3332 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3334 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3335 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3336 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3338 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3339 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3340 the log will look right.</p>
3342 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3343 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3345 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3346 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3348 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3349 to fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
3350 <code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
3351 fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>,
3352 and that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably
3353 also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.</p>
3355 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by
3356 reconfiguring with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3358 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3359 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3360 Switching to a faster MTA like qmail or exim might help.</p>
3362 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3363 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3365 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3368 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3369 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3370 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3372 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3373 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3374 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3375 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3376 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3379 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3381 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3382 option working?</a></h2>
3384 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3385 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3386 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3387 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3388 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3389 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3390 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3391 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3393 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3394 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3396 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3397 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3398 turn <cite>keep</cite> off.</p>
3400 <p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL
3401 feature that can lead to all your old messages being seen again
3402 after a line drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL
3403 code breaks worse every time I touch it. The problem is
3404 fundamental; maintaining and garbage-collecting the right kind of
3405 client-side state is just hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and
3406 removed LAST should be hung up by his thumbs and whipped with
3407 scorpions. The right answers are either (a) live with the
3408 occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4, or (c) fix the code
3409 yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose (c), I don't want
3410 to hear about it.</p>
3412 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3413 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3414 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3415 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3416 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3417 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3418 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3420 <p>James Stevens <James.Stevens at kyzo.com> writes:</p>
3422 <p><em>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from
3423 an NT POP3 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting
3424 each e-mail one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very
3425 unreliable and would often just drop out in the middle of a
3428 <p><em>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated
3429 normally (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll
3430 back all the deletes !!!</em></p>
3432 <p><em>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just
3433 end up continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or,
3434 if the queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
3435 connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back
3436 any deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the
3437 first few e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became
3438 fuller and fuller the chances of getting a connection long enough
3439 to collect theentire mailbox became smaller and smaller.</em></p>
3441 <p><em>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5
3442 or 10) e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3
3443 connection is terminated correctly.</em></p>
3445 <p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
3446 to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
3447 switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.</p>
3449 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my
3450 messages the same?</a></h2>
3452 <p>This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking
3453 the received date from the last Received header.</p>
3455 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3456 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3458 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.</p>
3460 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3461 get the message only once per run.</p>
3463 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3464 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3466 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3468 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3470 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3471 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3472 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3473 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3475 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3477 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3478 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3479 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3480 your local server is.</p>
3482 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>.</p>
3484 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3487 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3489 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3491 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3492 does something like "date >> $HOME/Procmail/fetchmail.log".</p>
3494 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3497 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> (available since release 6.3.0) to
3498 delete oversized mails along with the <code>--limit</code> option. If
3499 you are already having <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete
3500 oversized mails, <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to
3501 avoid losing mails unintentionally.</p>
3503 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3504 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3505 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3506 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3507 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3508 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3509 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3511 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3514 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3515 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3516 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3517 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3518 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3519 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3524 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3525 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3526 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3527 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3528 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3529 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3532 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3533 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3534 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3535 with the data reset to initial values.
3539 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3540 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3541 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3542 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3546 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
3548 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
3550 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
3555 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3556 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3557 Matthias Andree</address>