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13 <td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 2002/05/24 06:47:21 $
16 <H1>Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</H1>
18 <p>Before reporting any bug, please read <a href="#G3">G3</a> for advice
19 on how to include diagnostic information that will get your bug fixed
20 as quickly as possible.
22 <p>If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to
23 this FAQ list, mail it to fetchmail's maintainer, Eric S. Raymond, at
24 <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com">esr@thyrsus.com</A>.
26 <h1>General questions:</h1>
28 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br>
29 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br>
30 <a href="#G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br>
31 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br>
32 <a href="#G5">G5. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br>
33 <a href="#G6">G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br>
34 <a href="#G7">G7. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br>
35 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br>
36 <a href="#G9">G9. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br>
37 <a href="#G10">G10. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic
39 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br>
40 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br>
41 <a href="#G13">G13. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br>
42 <a href="#G14">G14. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br>
43 <a href="#G15">G15. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br>
45 <h1>Build-time problems:</h1>
47 <a href="#B1">B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</a><br>
48 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br>
49 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br>
50 <a href="#B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a><br>
52 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions:</h1>
54 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br>
55 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br>
56 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with `no'.</a><br>
57 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a `parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br>
59 <h1>Configuration questions:</h1>
61 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root on my own machine?</a><br>
62 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get killed when I log out?</a><br>
63 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?</a><br>
64 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam features?</a><br>
65 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less often than others?</a><br>
66 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not from an init script.</a><br>
67 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another host?.</a><br>
69 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs:</h1>
71 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br>
72 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br>
73 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br>
74 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br>
75 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br>
76 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br>
77 <a href="#T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a><br>
79 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers:</h1>
81 <a href="#S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a><br>
82 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br>
83 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br>
84 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br>
85 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br>
86 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br>
87 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br>
88 <a href="#S8">S8. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?</a><br>
89 <a href="#S9">S9. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br>
90 <a href="#S10">S10. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br>
91 <a href="#S11">S11. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br>
92 <a href="#S12">S12. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br>
93 <a href="#S13">S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br>
94 <a href="#S14">S14. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br>
95 <a href="#S15">S15. How can I use fetchmail with GMX?</a><br>
97 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication methods:</h1>
99 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br>
100 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br>
101 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br>
102 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br>
103 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br>
105 <h1>Runtime fatal errors:</h1>
107 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed' messages.</a><br>
108 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.</a><br>
109 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc file.</a><br>
110 <a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.</a><br>
111 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.</a><br>
112 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br>
113 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade</a><br>
114 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
115 messages but before deleting them</a><br>
116 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br>
117 <a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br>
119 <h1>Hangs and lockups:</h1>
121 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br>
122 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM exchange.</a><br>
123 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br>
125 <h1>Disappearing mail:</h1>
127 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a><br>
128 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped connection.</a><br>
129 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br>
131 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems:</h1>
133 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a><br>
134 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local domain properly.</a><br>
135 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a><br>
136 <a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS problems.</a><br>
137 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is processed.</a><br>
138 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with majordomo?</a><br>
139 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses from
140 my Received headers as it should.</a><br>
141 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of messages.</a><br>
143 <h1>Mangled mail:</h1>
145 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.</a><br>
146 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject line.</a><br>
147 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.</a><br>
148 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different way.</a><br>
149 <a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too much!</a><br>
150 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or mangled.</a><br>
151 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging fetchmail.</a><br>
152 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my messages.</a><br>
154 <h1>Other problems:</h1>
156 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile doesn't exist.</a><br>
157 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header is
158 dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br>
159 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll cycle?</a><br>
160 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
161 a line hit while downloading?</a><br>
162 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From address?</a><br>
163 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a><br>
164 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted order?</a><br>
165 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option working?</a><br>
166 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same messages
167 over and over?</a><br>
168 <a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the same?</a><br>
172 <h2><a name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a></h2>
174 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval problem
175 for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an intermittent PPP or
176 SLIP connection to a remote mailserver. It can collect mail using any
177 variant of POP or IMAP and forwards via port 25 to the local SMTP
178 listener, enabling all the normal forwarding/filtering/aliasing
179 mechanisms that would apply to local mail or mail arriving via a
180 full-time TCP/IP connection.
182 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
183 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
184 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection up
185 to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
186 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
187 feature-rich, and well documented.
189 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
190 software. The openness of the sources is the strongest assurance of
191 quality you can have. Extensive peer review by a large,
192 multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as near
193 bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.
195 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
196 href="http://gnu.org//copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
199 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for fetchmail's
203 <h2><a name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail
206 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
207 sources at the fetchmail home page:
208 <a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail">
209 http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail</a>. You can also usually find
211 href="http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.html">POP
212 mail tools directory on Sunsite</a>.
214 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
215 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it may
216 not be completely current.
219 <h2><a name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a></h2>
221 <p>Yes I will, provided you include enough diagnostic information for me
222 to go on. Send bugs to <a
223 href="mailto:fetchmail-friends@ccil.org">fetchmail-friends</a>. When reporting
224 bugs, please include the following:
227 <li>Your operating system.
228 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
229 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you installed.
230 <li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.
231 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are forwarding to.
232 <li>Any command-line options you used.
233 <li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
234 command-line options you used.
237 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have any
238 suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message, please
239 include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.
241 <p>Often, the first thing I will do when you report a bug is tell you to
242 upgrade to the newest version of fetchmail, and then see if the
243 problem reproduces. So you'll probably save us both time if you
244 upgrade and test with the latest version <em>before</em> sending in a
247 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working when
248 you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
249 href="ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/fetchmail/">intermediate versions of
250 fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
251 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the version
252 sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last good one
253 and the current one. If it works, the failure was introduced in the
254 upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the failure was introduced
255 in the lower half. Now bisect that half in the same way. In a very
256 few tries, you should be able to identify the exact adjacent pair
257 of versions between which your bug was introduced -- and with
258 information like that, I can usually come up with a fix very quickly.
260 <p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to test for
261 IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe function of
262 fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf doesn't tell you
263 it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak, poorly-designed
264 protocol with chronic problems, and the later versions after RFC1725
265 actually get worse rather than better. Changing over to IMAP4 may well
266 make your problem go away -- and if your ISP doesn't have IMAP4
267 support, bug them to supply it.
269 <p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not necessary
270 unless your symptom seems to involve an error in configuration
271 parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask the passwords
274 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look mangled
275 (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted in the
276 headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a href="#X1">X</a>
277 before submitting a bug report. Pay special attention to the item on
278 <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing mail mangling</a>. There are
279 lots of ways for other programs in the mail chain to screw up that
280 look like fetchmail's fault, but you may be able to fix these by
281 tweaking your configuration.
283 <p>A transcript of the failed session with -v -v (yes, that's
284 <em>two</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost always be useful.
285 It is very important that the transcript include your POP/IMAP server's
286 greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server problems. This
287 transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are specially masked
288 out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.
290 <p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should include
291 session transcripts with -v -v of both the working and failing
292 versions. Very often, the source of the problem can instantly
293 identified by looking at the differences in protocol transactions.
295 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is good to have.
296 (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running but hung process by
297 giving the process ID as a second argument.) You will need to
301 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
304 and then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be gdb-traced.
306 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce the
307 bug under the latest (current) version.
309 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed very quickly, often
310 within 48 hours. Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the
311 solution isn't obvious when I first look, it may evade me for a long
312 time (or to put it another way, fetchmail is well enough tested that the
313 easy bugs have long since been found). So if you want your bug fixed
314 rapidly, it is not just sufficient but nearly <em>necessary</em> that
315 you give me a way to reproduce it.
318 <h2><a name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a></h2>
320 Probably not. Most of the feature suggestions I get are for ways to
321 set various kinds of administrative policy or add more spam filtering
322 (the most common one, which I used to get about four million times a week
323 and got <em>really</em> tired of, is for tin-like kill files).
325 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on the
326 server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf domain
327 exclusions. You can do other policy things better with the
328 <CODE>mda</CODE> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
329 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
330 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.
332 <p>I'm not going to do these; fetchmail's job is transport, not policy, and I
333 refuse to change it from doing one thing well to attempting many things badly.
334 One of my objectives is to keep fetchmail simple so it stays reliable.
336 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested features
337 (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls from the
338 same instance of fetchmail) see the <a
339 href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail/design-notes.html">design notes</a>.
341 <p>Fetchmail is a mature project, no longer in constant active
342 development. It is no longer my top project, and I am going to be
343 quite reluctant to add features that might either jeopardize its
344 stability or involve me in large amounts of coding.
346 <p>All that said, if you have a feature idea that really is about a transport
347 problem that can't be handled anywhere but fetchmail, lay it on me. I'm
348 very accommodating about good ideas.
351 <h2><a name="G5">G5. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a></h2>
353 <p>There is a fetchmail-friends list
354 (fetchmail-friends@lists.ccil.org) for people who want to discuss fixes
355 and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a MailMan
356 list, which you can sign up for at
357 <a href="http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-friends">http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-friends</a>.
358 There is also an announcements-only list,
359 fetchmail-announce@lists.ccil.org, which you can sign up for at <a href="http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.
362 <h2><a name="G6">G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
364 <p>The fetchmail development was also a sociological experiment, an
365 extended test to see if my theory about the critical features of the
366 Linux development model is correct.
368 <p>The experiment was a success. I wrote a paper about it titled <a
369 href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
370 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
371 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
372 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
373 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
374 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape tell me it helped
376 href="http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html"> give
377 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.
379 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the paper
380 on the Web with a search for that title.
383 <h2><a name="G7">G7. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a></h2>
385 <p>The short answer: IMAP 2000 running over Unix.
387 <p>Here's a longer answer:
389 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server that
390 conforms to the relevant RFCs (and even some outright broken ones like
391 <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a href="#S12">Novell
392 GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally well with all,
393 however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without LAST, limit
394 fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
397 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come with
398 POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken POP3
399 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing minority
400 also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by running fetchmail in
401 AUTO mode, or by using the `Probe for supported protocols' function in
402 the fetchmailconf utility).
404 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an IMAP4rev1
405 server; it has the best facilities for tracking message `seen' states.
406 It also recovers from interrupted connections more gracefully than
407 POP3, and enables some significant performance optimizations. The new
408 <a href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.tar.Z">IMAP 2000</a>
409 is particularly nice, as it supports CRAM-MD5 so you don't have to
410 ship your mail password over the net en clair (fetchmail autodetects
411 this capability). Older versions had support for GSSAPI giving a
414 <p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just plain
415 broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle the
416 sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even Microsoft
417 itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail service runs
418 over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John Kirch's excellent <a
419 href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white paper</a> on Unix
422 <p>Source for a high-quality supported implementation of POP is available
423 from the <a href="ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/">Eudora
424 FTP site</a>. Don't use 2.5, which has a rather restrictive license.
425 The 2.5.2 version appears to restore the open-source license of
429 <h2><a name="G8">G8. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a></h2>
431 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail transport
432 programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you use, and user
433 agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to how mail is
434 delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the popular Unix mail
435 agents -- <a href="http://www.myxa.com/old/elm.html">elm</a>, <a
436 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
437 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or <a
438 href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> -- will work fine with fetchmail.
440 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet plug
441 for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. My own personal mail
442 setup is sendmail plus fetchmail plus mutt. Mutt's interface is only
443 a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor elm, but its
444 excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it in a class by itself. You
445 won't need its built-in POP3 support, though; most of the mutt
446 developers will cheerfully admit that fetchmail's is better :-).
449 <h2><a name="G9">G9. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a></h2>
451 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this ranges
452 from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to useless.
454 <p>Most people use fetchmail over phone wires, which are hard to tap.
455 Anybody with the skill and resources to do this could get into your
456 server mailbox with much less effort by subverting the server host.
457 So if your provider setup is modem wires going straight into a service
458 box, you probably don't need to worry.
460 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
461 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
462 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
463 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a TCP/IP
464 packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
465 concentrator you dial in to and the mailserver host).
467 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password encryption
468 alone will really address your security exposure. If you think you
469 might be snooped between server and client, it's better to use
470 end-to-end encryption on your whole mail stream so none of it can be
471 read. One of the advantages of fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push
472 delivery is that you may be able to arrange this by using ssh(1); see
473 <a href="#K3">K3</a>.
475 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your mail
476 could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from wherever it
477 originated. For best security, agree with your correspondents to use
478 a tool such as <a href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GPG</a> (Gnu Privacy
479 Guard) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
481 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for you to
482 set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious cracker
483 from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your connection
484 continuously or crack root on the server in order to read it.
486 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
487 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the
488 response to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code>
489 to see these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
492 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, you'll have CRAM-MD5 support
493 built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest of this
496 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP. This is a
497 POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's autoprobe
498 facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If you see
499 something in the greeting line that looks like an
500 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand part,
501 that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in). You can
502 register a secret on the host (using <code>popauth(8)</code> or some
503 program like it). Specify the secret as your password in your
504 .fetchmailrc; it will be used to encrypt the current challenge, and
505 the encrypted form will be sent back the the server for
508 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require you
509 to set up some magic files in your home directory on your client
510 machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at all.
512 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
513 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server to
514 see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the greeting
515 line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility described
516 by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is present by looking
517 for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY response.
519 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can use
520 their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
521 href="#S3">S3</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
522 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.
524 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use one-time
525 passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the 2.2 version
526 of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig Metz</a>). To check
527 this, look for the string "otp-" in the greeting line. If you see it,
528 and your fetchmail was built with OPIE support compiled in (see the
529 distribution INSTALL file), fetchmail will detect it also. When using
530 OTP, you will specify a password but it will not be sent en clair.
532 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a name="cmetz">Craig
534 href="http://www.inner.net/pub/">http://www.inner.net/pub/</a>.<p>
535 These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP" because
536 there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail also uses
537 this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They better,
538 because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)
540 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
541 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.
544 <h2><a name="G10">G10. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
546 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
547 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO
548 address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname part.
549 Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but when you are
550 using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your machine's
551 fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).
553 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running in daemon
554 mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your client
555 machine had when it started up.
557 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation time)
558 doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result is that
559 your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses. More
560 frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent host
561 address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your mail
562 to the wrong machine!
564 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended hostname
565 to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
566 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name `localhost' will usually work; or
567 you can use the IP address itself).
569 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP address,
570 `<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set the gateway
571 device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will use. Such a
572 restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons, especially on
573 multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.
575 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code> option
576 when initially developing your poll configuration -- it's never
577 necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link working
578 first, observe the actual address range you see on connections, and
579 add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need one) later.
581 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP changes
582 your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect). You need
583 to have your own registered domain and a definite IP address
584 registered for that domain. The server needs to be configured to
585 accept mail for your domain but then queue it to forward to your
586 machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its queue for your
587 domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in that case.
589 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP address;
590 that's what it was designed for, and it provides capabilities very
591 similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are not yet widely
592 deployed, as of early 2001.
594 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other (non-fetchmail)
595 problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that some sites will
596 bounce your email because the hostname your giving them isn't real
597 (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse DNS on your
598 dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you need to hack
599 your sendmail so it masquerades as your host. Setting
605 in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set<p>
608 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
611 in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases, replace
612 <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your mailhost.)
613 See the <a href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail
614 FAQ</a> for more details.
617 <h2><a name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a></h2>
619 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
620 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about SOCKS,
621 and download the SOCKS software including server and client code, at
622 the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
625 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
629 <h2><a name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
631 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do I need
632 to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?
634 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
635 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
636 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
637 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while
638 the connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.
640 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on most
641 Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in the
642 outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
643 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
644 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.
647 <h2><a name="G13">G13. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
649 Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.<p>
651 Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit time_t
652 counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps aren't used
653 for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you aren't running
654 on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to lose.
657 <h2><a name="G14">G14. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></H2>
659 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a protocol
660 gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected operation
661 requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very different problem.
664 <h2><a name="G15">G15. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a></h2>
666 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
667 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822 header, and
668 that storage is freed when body processing begins. It is, accordingly,
669 quite economical in its use of memory.
671 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
672 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has changed
673 and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in normal
674 operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up to the
675 MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.
677 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on the POP
678 server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server. This is not
679 a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even by buying more
680 TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth but not necessarily
684 <h2><a name="B1">B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</a></h2>
686 <p>The vendor-supplied make on FreeBSD systems can only be used within
687 FreeBSD's "scope", e.g. the ports collection. Type "gmake" to run GNU
688 make and better things will happen.
691 <h2><a name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
693 <p>In the immortal words of Alan Cox the last time this came up: ``Take
694 the Solaris lex and stick it up the backside of a passing Sun
695 salesman, then install <a
696 href="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/non-gnu/flex/">flex</a> and use that. All
699 <p>I couldn't have put it better myself, and ain't going to try now.
701 <p>(The same problem has been reported under HP-UX v10.20 and IRIX)
704 <h2><a name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a></h2>
706 If you get errors resembling these
709 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto `__res_search'
710 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to`__dn_skipname'
711 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to`__dn_expand'
712 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to`__dn_expand'
713 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
716 then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your Makefile
717 once you have installed the `bind' package.
719 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like this:
722 rcfile_y.o: In function `yyparse':
723 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
724 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
725 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
726 rcfile_y.o: In function `yyerror':
727 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
728 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
729 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to `dcgettext__' follow
732 reconfigure with <tt>configure --with-included-gettext</tt>. This is
733 due to some brain-damage in the GNU internationalization libraries.
736 <h2><a name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a></h2>
738 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.
740 <p>GNU gettext is an overengineered, fragile pile of crap. I have
741 teetered on the brink of removing support for it entirely several times.
744 <h2><a name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no longer work?</a></h2>
746 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
748 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt> option to
749 a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.
751 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
753 <p>The `via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is gone.
754 Use the %h feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.
756 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
758 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed back to
759 <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be supported
760 through a few more point releases.
762 <p><h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
764 The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
765 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
766 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
767 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have RFC1734
768 support for the AUTH command.
770 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver, fetchmail
771 now first tries methods that don't require a password (GSSAPI,
772 KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your password
773 (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't support any of
774 those will it ship your password en clair.
776 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than `password'
777 will prevent from looking for a password in your <tt>.netrc</tt> file
778 or querying for it at startup time.<p>
780 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
782 In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
785 <p><h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
787 If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need to
788 make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for an SMTP
789 target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order to avoid
790 DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries to derive
791 the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at startup.
793 <p><h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
795 Just after the `<CODE>via</CODE>' option was introduced, I realized
796 that the interactions between the `<CODE>via</CODE>',
797 `<CODE>aka</CODE>', and `<CODE>localdomains</CODE>' options were out
798 of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so much so
799 that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users were being
800 unpleasantly surprised.
802 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it. The
803 redesign simplified the code and made the options more orthogonal, but
804 may have broken some complex multidrop configurations.
806 Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just after the
807 `<CODE>poll</CODE>' or `<CODE>skip</CODE>' keyword being still
808 interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even in the
809 presence of a `<CODE>via</CODE>' option, will break.
811 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations (such
812 as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV tickets) might
813 also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky that we can't be
814 sure. If you think this has happened to you, contact the maintainer.
816 <p><h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
818 The `<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to `<code>folder</code>'.
819 If you try to use the old keyword, the parser will utter a warning.
821 <p><h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
823 It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written in the
824 old popclient syntax without an explicit `<CODE>username</CODE>'
825 keyword leading the first user entry attached to a server entry.
827 This error can be triggered by having a user option such as `<CODE>keep</CODE>'
828 or `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' before the first explicit username. For
829 example, if you write
832 poll openmail protocol pop3
833 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
836 the `<CODE>keep</CODE>' option will generate an entire user entry with
837 the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking user).
839 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It complicated
840 the configuration file grammar and confused users.
842 <p><h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
844 The `<CODE>interface</CODE>', `<CODE>monitor</CODE>' and
845 `<CODE>batchlimit</CODE>' options changed after 2.8.
847 <p>They used to be global options with `<CODE>set</CODE>' syntax like the
848 batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server options, like
849 `<CODE>protocol</CODE>'.
851 <p>If you had something like
854 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
857 in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
858 `interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your `defaults'
861 <p>Do similarly for any `<CODE>monitor</CODE>' or `<CODE>batchlimit</CODE>' options.
864 <h2><a name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
866 Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes around it. :-)
868 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions treated any
869 all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when it was
870 expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's class.
872 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
873 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.
876 <h2><a name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with `no'.</a></h2>
878 See <a href="#F2">F2</a> You're caught in an unfortunate crack between
879 the newer-style syntax for negated options (`no keep', `no rewrite'
880 etc.) and the older style run-on syntax (`nokeep', `norewrite'
883 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes around your
887 <h2><a name="F4">F4. I'm getting a `parse error' message I don't understand.</a></h2>
889 The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a server
890 option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll probably
891 find that by moving one or more options closer to the `poll' keyword
892 you can eliminate the problem.
894 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
895 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the `defaults'
899 <h2><a name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
901 Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:
903 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as root
904 from a cron job, like this:
907 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
910 This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's home
911 directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
912 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
913 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory containing:
916 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
920 It won't work if the second line is just "<CODE>user itz</CODE>". This is silly.
922 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the `default local user' (i.e. the
923 uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases, and the
924 `default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They should.
928 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't much
929 like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The problem is
930 that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a local user `itz'
933 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if the remote
934 name matches a local one?" Well, there are two reasons.
936 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host declared
937 that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You lose.
939 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same person?
940 They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are unless
941 local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it (that is, the
942 server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc file.).
944 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking about
945 ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find that all the
946 alternatives to the present default are worse or unacceptably
947 more complicated or both.
950 <h2><a name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
952 The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
953 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
954 arrange for the command `fetchmail -q' to be called on logout. Under
955 bash, you can arrange this by putting `fetchmail -q' in the file
956 `~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute `~/.logout' on logout.
957 For other shells, consult your shell manual page.
959 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to arrange
960 if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the contrib
961 subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some shell code
962 you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout profiles that will
963 accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere <babydr@nwrain.net> for
966 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up and
967 ppp-down scripts of pppd.
970 <h2><a name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
972 This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and right
973 now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer BSDs). However,
974 here are some important rules of thumb that can help. If they don't
975 work, ask your local sysop or your Internet provider.
977 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your machine
978 only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost certainly by a
979 point to point modem connection to your provider's local subnet that's
980 pretty secure against snooping (unless someone can tap your phone or
981 the provider's local subnet!). Under these circumstances, specifying
982 an interface address is fairly pointless.
984 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
985 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
986 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
987 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
988 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
989 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
990 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
993 <p>To determine the device:
996 <li> If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably sl0.
997 <li> If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably ppp0.
998 <li> If you're using a direct connection over a local network such as
999 an ethernet, use the command `netstat -r' to look at your routing table.
1000 Try to match your mailserver name to a destination entry; if you don't
1001 see it in the first column, use the `default' entry. The device name
1002 will be in the rightmost column.
1005 To determine the address and netmask:
1008 <li> If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably 10.0.2.15,
1009 with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure slirp to present
1010 other addresses, but that's the default.)
1012 <li> If you have a static IP address, run `ifconfig <device>', where <device>
1013 is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP address given after
1014 "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your end of the link, and is
1015 what you need. You won't need to specify a netmask.
1017 <li> If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary randomly
1018 over some given range (that is, some number of the least significant bits
1019 change from connection to connection). You need to declare an address
1020 with the variable bits zero and a complementary netmask that sets
1024 To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose you're
1025 hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the dynamic
1026 address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1027 205.164.136.255. Then
1030 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1033 would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1034 (65536 addresses) you would use
1037 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1041 <h2><a name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1043 This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the version
1044 installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older version,
1045 upgrade to sendmail 8.9.
1047 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a database of
1048 filter rules. The human-readable form of the database is at
1049 <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1050 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.
1052 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1053 numbers as keys. For example,</P>
1055 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1056 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1059 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1060 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain), and
1061 any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be used to
1062 do other things as well; see the <a
1063 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti-spam.html">sendmail
1064 documentation</a> for details)</P>
1066 To actually set up the database, run
1069 makemap hash deny <deny
1073 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host and
1074 then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument. You
1075 can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is parsed,
1076 if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist, fetchmail will
1077 flush and delete it.
1079 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or <strong>any host
1080 you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into your reject file. You
1081 <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do this!!!
1084 <h2><a name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
1085 often than others?</a></h2>
1087 Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1088 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1089 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1090 minutes, use something like this:
1093 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1094 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1097 Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1098 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of every
1099 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled every 30
1103 <h2><a name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1105 Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an interactive
1106 login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root" when you are
1107 logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or set to "/" when the
1108 startup scripts are running. That means fetchmail at startup can't find
1111 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's -f
1112 option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the problem.
1115 <h2><a name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another host?</a></h2>
1117 To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running fetchmail
1118 on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpname</code> option.
1119 See the manual page for details.
1122 <h2><a name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a></h2>
1124 For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric Allman
1125 tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is included
1126 in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the <code>rewrite</code>
1129 <p>If your sendmail complains ``sendmail does not relay'', make sure
1130 your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code>
1131 so that sendmail recognizes `localhost' as a name of its host.
1133 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network, also
1134 ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in name_allow
1135 (usually in /etc/mail/)
1137 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1138 `FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail
1139 that fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1140 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.
1142 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't work with
1143 fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553 Local configuration
1144 error, hostname not recognized as local</code>". The problem is that
1145 fetchmail normally feeds sendmail with the client machine's host
1146 address in the MAIL FROM line. These sendmails think this means
1147 they're seeing the result of a mail loop and suppress the mail. You
1148 may be able to work around this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.
1150 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to your
1151 mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this rule:
1154 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1157 This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1158 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail sees
1159 it, and tell fetchmail which header it is. With this change,
1160 multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received header
1161 omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case when
1162 the message has multiple recipients). However it will still not
1163 distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that no bounce
1164 will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple users at
1165 your site. To fix even that problem, you might want to try the
1166 following hack, which is however untested and quite experimental:
1169 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1171 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1172 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1173 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1174 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1177 For both hacks, you have to declare `<CODE>envelope "Delivered-To:"</CODE>' on
1178 the fetchmail side, to put the virtual domain (e.g. `domain.com')
1179 with RELAY permission into your access file and to add a line
1180 reading `<CODE>domain.com local:local-pop-user</CODE>' for the first and
1181 `<CODE>domain.com mdrop:local-pop-user</CODE>' for the second hack to your
1184 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To header,
1185 sendmail will not add another. Further, editing sendmail.cf
1186 directly is not very comfortable. Solutions for both problems
1187 can be found in Peter `Rattacresh' Backes' `hybrid' patch against
1188 sendmail. Have a look at it, you can find it in the contrib
1191 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the contrib
1192 subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it attempts
1193 to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external script.
1196 <h2><a name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a></h2>
1198 Turn on the <CODE>forcecr</CODE> option; qmail's listener mode doesn't like
1199 header or message lines terminated with bare linefeeds.
1201 <p>(This information is thanks to Robert de Bath
1202 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)
1204 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package (see <a
1205 href="http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html">http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html</a>)
1206 then, providing the local hosts are also using qmail, it is possible
1207 to set up one fetchmail link to be reliably collect the mail for an
1210 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the `Delivered-To:' message
1211 header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local mailbox it puts
1212 the username and hostname of the envelope recipient on this line. The
1213 major reason for this is to prevent mail loops.
1215 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site the ISP-mailhost
1216 will have normally put that site in its `virtualhosts' control file so
1217 it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this site. This results
1218 in mail sent to 'username@userhost.userdom.dom.com' having a
1219 'Delivered-To:' line of the form:
1222 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.dom.com
1225 A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:
1228 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.dom.com
1231 The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1232 but a string matching the user host name is likely.
1234 <p>To use this line you must:
1237 <li>Ensure the option `envelope Delivered-To:' is in the fetchmail
1240 <li>Ensure you have a localdomains containing 'userdom.dom.com' or
1241 `userhost.dom.com' respectively.
1244 So far this reliably delivers messages to the correct machine of the
1245 local network, to deliver to the correct user the 'mbox-userstr-'
1246 prefix must be stripped off of the user name. This can be done by
1247 setting up an alias within the qmail MTA on each local machine.
1248 Simply create a dot-qmail file called '.qmail-mbox-userstr-default'
1249 in the alias directory (normally /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:
1252 | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"
1255 Note this <em>does</em> require a modern /bin/sh.
1257 <p>Peter Wilson adds:
1259 <p>``My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means that I
1260 need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is due to
1261 qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is handled by the
1262 file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or ~user/.qmail-default).''
1264 <p>Luca Olivetti adds:
1266 <p>If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up the
1267 alias mechanism described above, you can use the option `<code>qvirtual
1268 "mbox-userstr-"</code>' in your fetchmail config file to strip the prefix
1269 from the local user name.
1272 <h2><a name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a></h2>
1274 <p>If you have <CODE>rewrite</CODE> on:
1276 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO addresses
1277 you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully qualified
1278 hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully qualified
1279 RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept `localhost' as
1280 a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.
1282 <p>In exim.conf, add `localhost' to your local_domains declaration if it's not
1283 already present. For example, the author's site at thyrsus.com would
1284 have a line reading:
1287 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1290 If you have <CODE>rewrite</CODE> off:
1292 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your fetchmail
1293 don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path addresses,
1294 and fetchmail's <CODE>rewrite</CODE> option is off. The specific case
1295 where this has come up involves bounce messages generated by sendmail
1296 on your mailer host, which have the (un-canonicalized) origin address
1299 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <CODE>rewrite</CODE> option and
1300 have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path addresses with the
1301 mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This option is enabled by
1302 default, so it won't be off unless you turned it off.
1304 <p>If you must run with <CODE>rewrite</CODE> off, there is a switch in exim's
1305 configuration files that allows it to accept domainless MAIL FROM
1306 addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the line
1309 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1312 in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that this
1313 will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name attached
1314 to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname rather than
1315 that of the remote mail server).
1318 <h2><a name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a></h2>
1320 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may work
1321 fine out of the box.
1323 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1324 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an
1325 order other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1326 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1327 it is an smail `feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1330 <p>Very recent smail versions require an <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code>
1331 option in the smail config file. This overrides smail's check to see
1332 that the HELO address is actually that of the client machine, which
1333 is never going to be the case when fetchmail is in the picture.
1334 According to RFC1123 an SMTP listener <em>must</em> allow this
1335 mismatch, so smail's new behavior (introduced sometime between
1336 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.
1338 <p>You may also need to say
1339 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code>
1340 in order for smail to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally
1341 appends to recipient addresses.
1344 <h2><a name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a></h2>
1346 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1347 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard.
1349 href="http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">
1350 MMDF recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with
1351 fetchmail feeding MMDF.
1354 <h2><a name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a></h2>
1356 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should convert \n
1357 to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and correct-for-RFC822
1358 ones. Use `forcecr'.
1360 <a name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a></h2>
1362 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1363 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1364 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.
1367 <h2><a name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a></h2>
1369 Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3 servers, and
1370 is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some problems which
1371 fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a href="#G7">IMAP</a> instead if at
1372 all possible. If you must talk to qpopper, here are some problems to
1375 <p><h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
1377 Tony Tang <a href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a>
1378 reports that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper
1379 2.5.3 under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to
1380 2.0.35. When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3,
1381 fetchmail will hang with a socket error.
1383 <p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of some
1384 problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission pattern is
1385 tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also displays the hang
1386 but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The problem can also be
1388 href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to qpopper
1391 <p><h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
1393 Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad interaction
1394 with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a href="#X5">X5</a>
1395 for details. The solution is to upgrade your fetchmail.
1398 <h2><a name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a></h2>
1400 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is so
1401 broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1402 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted --
1403 you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message, with
1404 no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any other
1405 RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.
1407 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable.
1409 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used with
1410 M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with the
1411 --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option value
1412 that looks like `user@domain': the part to the left of the @ will
1413 be passed as the username and the part to the right as the NTLM domain.
1415 <p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command does
1416 not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the sizes of
1417 the compressed versions in the exchange mail database (thanks to Arjan
1418 De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this problem).
1420 <p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
1421 features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1422 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1423 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1424 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1425 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the listener's
1426 configured length limit).
1428 <p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
1429 registry bit that can fix this breakage:
1432 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1433 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1436 This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard protocol.
1437 The bits defined are:
1441 <DD>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command
1443 <DD>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and arguments
1445 <DD>Enable the LAST command
1447 <DD>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1448 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)
1450 <DD>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands (protocol
1451 requires 40, but some user names may be longer than that).
1453 <DD>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.
1456 There's another one that may be useful to know about:
1459 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1460 System\Pop3 Performance
1465 <DD>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending directly
1466 from the database (should always be on)
1468 Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing commands)
1469 (should only be on if you are seeing the problems reported
1472 <DD>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been deleted.
1475 The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me admitted
1476 that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public knowledge base.
1478 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has as its
1479 symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias". Grant
1482 This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to figure
1483 out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually keeping
1484 track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1485 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your
1486 mailbox name from your username.
1488 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1489 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because
1490 their username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another
1491 inept, lame, almost criminally negligent design decision from
1492 our friends in Redmond.
1494 <p>You've got several options:
1498 Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1499 usernames and mailbox names are the same.
1501 Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your
1502 username explicitly to your mailbox name.
1505 <p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
1506 ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
1507 Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or
1510 <p>I'll provide the CD.
1513 <h2><a name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1515 First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1516 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1517 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail -V</code>;
1518 if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're good to go,
1519 otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources (see the INSTALL
1520 file in the source distribution for directions).<p>
1522 Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password. Add
1523 `@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like `user
1524 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1525 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1526 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1527 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1528 `@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it
1529 is RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1530 plain-text password handshake.
1532 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail will show
1533 your pass-phrase in Unicode!
1535 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an RPA and
1536 non-RPA configuration:
1539 # This version will use RPA
1540 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1541 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1542 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1544 # This version will not use RPA
1545 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1546 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1547 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1551 <h2><a name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1553 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1555 You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user from
1556 Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username consisting of your
1557 Demon user name followed by your account name, with an at-sign between
1560 <p>For example, to download email for the user <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>,
1561 you could use the following .fetchmailrc file:
1564 set postmaster "philh"
1565 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1566 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1569 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1571 Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All messages
1572 have a Received: header added when they enter the maildrop, like this:
1575 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1576 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1579 To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that 'mailstore' is
1580 the name of the host which accepted the mail, and let it know the
1581 hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The following example assumes
1582 that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk, and that you have also bought
1583 "mail forwarding" for the domain my-company.co.uk (in which case your
1584 MTA must also be configured to accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)
1587 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1588 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1589 user xyz is * fetchall
1592 The `fetchall' command ensures that all mail is downloaded. If you
1593 want to leave mail on the server use `uidl' and `keep'; Demon does not
1594 implement the obsolete `top' command, because SDPS combines messages
1595 residing on two separate punt clusters into a single POP3 maildrop.
1596 If you do use UIDL, be aware that the "user@host" form for fetching
1597 mail from a particular Demon host will confuse fetchmail's UIDL code;
1600 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than 30
1601 days old; see their <a
1602 href="http://www.demon.net/info/helpdesk/demon_products/mail/sdps-tech.shtml">
1603 POP3 page</a> for details.
1605 <p><h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1607 There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on Demon
1608 Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but the person
1609 who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful if Demon
1610 Internet ever changes mail transports.
1612 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the envelope of a
1613 message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports if compiled with the
1614 --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the first line of the fetchmail -V
1615 response will include the string "+SDPS".
1617 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1618 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1619 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To address.
1621 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1622 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy it
1623 may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.
1626 <h2><a name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a></h2>
1628 Enable `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>'. A user reports that the 2.2 version
1629 of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1630 `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1631 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1632 certainly a server bug.
1634 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998) don't
1635 handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the argument
1636 you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the message.
1637 Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order to avoid
1638 marking messages seen, but `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' forces it to use
1641 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages. You may
1642 need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf to avoid having
1643 fetched mail rejected.
1645 <p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's servers.
1646 They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding another
1650 <h2><a name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a></h2>
1652 No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions prior to
1653 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1654 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in the
1655 LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty habit
1656 of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and Resent-
1659 <p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to get a
1660 POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead. OpenMail's
1661 project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in 6.0.
1663 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP command
1664 fails, returning only one line regrardless of its argument, on something
1665 identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".
1668 <h2><a name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1670 Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3 servers
1671 fail to include the first Received line of the message in the send to
1672 fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA interprets Received
1673 continuations as body lines and doesn't parse any of the following
1676 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "-mda" switch:
1678 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1680 Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.
1682 You should also consider using "fetchall" option because Geocities' servers
1683 sometimes think that the first 45 messages have already been read.
1685 <p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
1686 Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.
1689 <h2><a name="S8">S8. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?</a></h2>
1691 You can't, yet. But <a
1692 href="http://hawkins.emu.id.au/gotmail/">gotmail</a>
1693 might be what you need.
1696 <h2><a name="S9">S9. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1698 You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1699 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1700 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.
1702 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN as the
1703 only appropriate response.
1705 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1706 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1707 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be corrected.
1710 <h2><a name="S10">S10. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1712 The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as seen.
1713 This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it may end
1714 up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the <code>fetchall</code>
1715 flag to ensure that it's recovered on the next cycle.
1718 <h2><a name="S11">S11. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1720 The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a weird
1721 bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1722 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around this
1726 <h2><a name="S12">S12. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1728 You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see attachments.
1729 MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with attachments
1730 but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.
1732 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1733 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1734 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there is
1735 no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1736 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.
1739 <h2><a name="S13">S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1741 The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named GroupFoolish;
1742 it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably broken. Among
1743 other things, it doesn't include a required content length in its
1744 BODY[TEXT] response.
1746 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend voting
1747 with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you stick
1748 with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will probably pay
1749 for it with other problems.
1752 <h2><a name="S14">S14. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a></h2>
1754 You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see attachments.
1755 InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server; it reports the
1756 message length with attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or
1759 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing me that
1760 their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this problem. I don't
1761 have any reports one way or the other yet.
1763 <a name="S15">S15. How can I use fetchmail with GMX?</a></h2>
1765 <p>Use IMAP. The GMX StreamProxy server behaves badly on
1766 authentication failures, sending back a non-conformant error message
1767 (missing an <code>-ERR</code> tag) that confuses fetchmail.
1770 <h2><a name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
1772 Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports linking
1773 with socks library. If you specify the value of this option as
1774 ``yes'', the configure script will try to find the Rconnect library
1775 and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a directory
1776 containing the Rconnect library.
1778 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may work
1779 better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.
1782 <h2><a name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a></h2>
1784 To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports IPv6, the "Basic
1785 Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
1786 This currently means that you need to have a BSD/OS or NetBSD system with
1787 the NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution or a Linux system with a 2.2 or
1788 later kernel and net-tools. It should not be hard to build fetchmail on
1789 other IPv6 implementations if you can port the inet6-apps kit.
1791 <p>To use fetchmail with networking security (read: IPsec), you need a system that
1792 supports IPsec, the API described in the "Network Security API for Sockets"
1793 (draft-metz-net-security-api-01.txt), and the inet6-apps kit. This currently
1794 means that you need to have a BSD/OS or NetBSD system with the NRL IPv6+IPsec
1795 software distribution. A Linux IPsec implementation supporting this API will
1796 probably appear in the coming months.
1798 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from: <a
1799 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp</a>
1802 <p>The inet6-apps kit can be obtained from <a href="http://ftp.ps.pl/pub/linux/IPv6/inet6-apps/">http://ftp.ps.pl/pub/linux/IPv6/inet6-apps/</a>.
1804 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained from:
1807 <a href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
1808 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a>
1810 <a href="http://www.ipv6.inner.net/ipv6">http://www.ipv6.inner.net/ipv6</a>
1813 <a href="http://www.inner.net/ipv6">http://www.inner.net/ipv6</a> (via IPv4)
1817 <h2><a name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a></h2>
1819 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with IMAP:
1822 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
1825 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
1826 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells fetchmail
1827 that instead of opening a connection on the server's port 143 and
1828 doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to the server
1829 and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication (as well as
1830 getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons will detect
1831 that they've been called from the command line and assume the
1832 connection is preauthenticated.
1834 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
1835 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
1836 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that shouldn't
1840 <h2><a name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
1842 Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely identify you
1843 to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos V credentials
1844 with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable IMAP server.
1845 UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
1846 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
1847 is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for other
1848 reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and it has
1849 to have GSS support compiled in.
1851 <p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by default,
1852 since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V distribution
1853 (available via FTP at <a
1854 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
1855 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
1856 <pre>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</pre> option to configure. For
1857 instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries installed under
1858 /usr/krb5 so I run <pre>configure --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</pre>
1860 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this FAQ
1861 (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
1862 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html"> How to Kerberize your
1863 site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a credential for
1864 imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server (IMAP doesn't just
1865 use the host key). Then you'll need to have your credentials ready on
1866 your machine (cf. kinit).
1868 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss in your
1869 .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't need one. You
1870 can specify a username if you want, but this is only useful if your mailbox
1871 belongs to a username different from your Kerberos principal.
1873 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in cleartext in
1874 your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.
1877 <h2><a name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a></h2>
1879 You'll need to have the <a href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a>
1880 libraries installed. Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the
1881 OpenSSL libraries installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl)
1882 this will suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default
1883 location, you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after
1886 <p>Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek
1887 under OpenSSL versions 0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally
1888 tripped over, causing hangs. It is recommended that you install 0.9.6
1891 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
1892 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
1893 SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver
1894 to use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
1895 of care on the limited security provided.
1897 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains "PRNG
1898 not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This means that
1899 the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to locate a source
1900 of random bits from which to seed its random-number generator;
1901 normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and this message
1902 probably means your OS doesn't have that device.<p>.
1904 An interactive program could seed the random number generator from
1905 keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because fetchmail
1906 is primarily designed to run forever as a background daemon, that
1907 option is not available in this case.
1910 <h2><a name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
1912 Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25 listener
1913 is down or inaccessible.
1915 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your smtp
1916 host (which is normally `localhost' unless you've specified an smtp
1917 option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a greeting
1918 line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible or the listener
1919 is down, fix that first.
1921 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.9, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
1922 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
1923 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".
1925 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the most
1926 benign and typical problem is that the listener had a momentary seizure
1927 due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was polling it -- process
1928 table full or some other problem that stopped the listener process
1929 from forking. If your SMTP host is not `localhost' or something else
1930 in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch could also have been caused by
1931 transient nameserver failure.
1933 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of these
1934 kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups, because a
1935 future fetchmail run will get the mail through.
1937 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying to
1938 connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to work
1939 around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this only
1940 attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing problem. You
1941 should really try to figure out what's going on underneath before it
1942 bites you some other way.
1944 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes solve
1945 such problems by doing an <CODE>smtp</CODE> declaration with an IP
1946 address that your routing table maps to something other than the
1947 loopback device (he used ppp0).
1949 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
1950 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more than
1953 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't
1954 looking at <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5,
1955 look at <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like
1961 so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
1962 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file. Make
1963 sure it says something like
1969 again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen first.
1971 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname does
1972 not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port 25 and
1973 even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts, but
1974 fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter what you
1977 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who solved his SMTP
1978 connection problem by removing the reference to -lresolv from his link
1979 line and relinking. Apparently in some older Linux distributions the
1980 libc bind library version works better.
1982 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind library is
1983 linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it won't be, and
1984 this particular cause should go away.
1987 <h2><a name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
1989 (I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)
1991 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
1992 command-line options `<CODE>-k -m cat</CODE>'. This will dump exactly what
1993 fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the Received line
1994 fetchmail itself adds to the headers).
1996 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
1997 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
1998 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2002 <h2><a name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2004 This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been known
2005 to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of <code>flex</code>
2006 installed. The problem appears to be a result of building with an
2007 archaic version of lex.
2009 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.
2011 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2012 href="ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/~ftp/pub/gnu">flex</a> from the Free
2013 Software Foundation. An FSF <a
2014 href="http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/order/ftp.html">mirror site</a>
2015 will help you get it faster.
2018 <h2><a name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
2020 We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and gcc-2.7.2.
2021 It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier versions.
2023 <p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library malloc.
2025 <p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
2026 version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
2027 calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
2028 Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
2029 calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself, not the
2030 fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an fclose called
2031 directly by fetchmail, either).
2034 <h2><a name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.</a><br></h2>
2036 We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2037 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2038 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2039 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2042 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with the code
2043 in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon fetchmail. The isolated
2044 Linux case has been chased down to a failure in dup(2) that may reflect a
2047 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an ampersand
2048 to background it. A Sun user recommends this:
2051 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2054 The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that the process
2055 detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is started and dies
2056 immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it child of PID 1). This is
2057 important when you start fetchmail interactively and than quit
2058 interactive shell. The line above makes sure fetchmail lives after
2062 <h2><a name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a></h2>
2064 Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2065 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your PPP
2066 options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here are
2067 option values that work:
2074 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling a
2075 virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to different
2076 actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on different poll
2077 cycles. To work around this, change the poll name either to the real
2078 name of one of the servers in the ring or to a corresponding IP
2082 <h2><a name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2084 In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment changed
2085 from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move your
2086 .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the file.
2087 (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian systems.)
2090 <h2><a name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
2091 messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2093 There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly other
2094 recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel writes:
2097 TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's now the
2098 default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment.
2099 When the tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460,
2100 and then fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because
2101 is is not allowing for the timestamp.
2103 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time (typically 2
2104 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next (fragmented)
2105 packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the fragmentation and
2106 restores normal behaviour. To do this, [execute]
2108 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps
2110 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At least
2111 [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue blocking.
2115 <h2><a name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a></h2>
2117 This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR" command will
2118 cause the server to start sending large amounts of data, which means
2119 large packets. If your networking layer has a packet-fragmentation
2120 problem, that's where you'll see it.
2123 <h2><a name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a></h2>
2125 This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your MDA is
2126 croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove the
2127 <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP listener.
2130 <h2><a name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a></h2>
2132 Your problem may be with pppd's `demand' option. We have a report that
2133 fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with pppd if `demand'
2134 is turned off. We have no idea why this is.
2137 <h2><a name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM exchange.</a></h2>
2139 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to hang after
2140 sending the MAIL FROM command
2143 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2146 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2147 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2148 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2149 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.
2151 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:
2155 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc
2156 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2161 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2163 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2165 <li>Restart sendmail.
2168 <p>For more details consult the file /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.
2171 <h2><a name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a></h2>
2173 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages, but
2177 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2178 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2179 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2180 .......fetchmail: flushed
2181 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2182 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2185 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through TCP
2188 <p>Adding 'sendmail : ALL' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve this problem.
2191 <h2><a name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2193 Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten about. You
2194 should probably remove it.
2196 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as root
2197 without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2198 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.
2200 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail -v
2201 and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.
2203 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the following
2207 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2210 make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.
2214 <h2><a name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped connection.</a></h2>
2216 One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports itself as
2217 POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005 fixed that.
2218 If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It also truncates
2219 long lines at column 1024)
2221 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the whole
2222 mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it right
2223 away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right away, cross
2224 your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.
2226 <p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to restore
2227 the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If you have
2228 one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a small
2229 <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP connects
2230 to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes to the queue
2233 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better behaved.
2234 If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all DELE commands as
2235 though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical violation of
2236 the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky phone lines). Then it
2237 will re-queue any message that was being downloaded at hangup time.
2238 Still, qpopper may require a noticeable amount of time to do deletions
2239 and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail waits a bit before retrying in
2240 order to avoid a `lock busy' error.)
2243 <h2><a name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2245 Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when either
2246 (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2247 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2248 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2249 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.
2251 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2252 command marks a message `seen' as soon as the fetch command to get it
2253 is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually delivered
2254 (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25 listener
2255 can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the delivery in
2256 mid-message) that `seen' message can lurk invisibly in your server
2259 <p>Workaround: add the `<CODE>fetchall</CODE>' keyword to your fetch options.
2261 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a> server.
2264 <h2><a name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
2265 mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2267 Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2268 recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
2269 matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
2270 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot of
2271 messages with the format ``line rejected, %s is not an alias of the
2272 mailserver'' or ``no address matches; forwarding to %s.''
2274 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration problem
2275 either on the server or your client machine.
2277 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a `<CODE>via</CODE>' option (if
2278 necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
2279 mailserver's aliases, then say `<CODE>no dns</CODE>'. This will take
2280 DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be uncollected if
2281 it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you don't have
2284 <p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can hurt
2285 you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
2286 intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the net.
2288 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing problem
2289 described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.
2292 <h2><a name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2294 A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's internetwork
2295 mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole domain in a single
2296 server mailbox and then routing based on what's in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.
2298 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter to
2299 just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use fetchmail's
2300 ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically (of course, this means
2301 you have to poll more frequently than the mailserver's expiration period).
2302 If you can't arrange this, try setting up a UUCP feed.
2304 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode may do
2305 (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing list
2306 software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2307 MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
2308 is with the `<CODE>localdomains</CODE>' option.
2310 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two other
2313 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to invoke multidrop mode.</strong>
2315 <p>Many people set a `<CODE>localdomains</CODE>' list and then forget
2316 that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the wildcard `*')
2317 in a `<CODE>here</CODE>' list before it will do multidrop routing.
2319 <p><strong>2. You may have to set `no envelope'.</strong>
2321 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address from a message
2322 before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it to avoid losing to mailing
2323 list software that doesn't put a recipient address in the To lines).
2325 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single server
2326 mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address that is
2327 useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set `<CODE>no
2328 envelope</CODE>' to prevent fetchmail from being bamboozled by this.
2330 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do multidrop
2331 delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider) is using qmail.
2334 <h2><a name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2336 This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the list
2337 expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver (that is, not on
2338 the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just chop the host part off any
2339 local addresses in the list.
2341 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2342 <CODE>sendmail -bv</CODE>.
2345 <h2><a name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS problems.</a></h2>
2347 <p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
2348 href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the reference
2349 to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some
2350 older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version works
2353 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind library
2354 is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it won't be,
2355 and this problem should go away.
2358 <h2><a name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is processed.</a></h2>
2360 <p>Use the `<CODE>aka</CODE>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2361 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2362 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check it.
2364 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS names,
2365 you can use the `<CODE>no dns</CODE>' option to prevent other hostname
2366 parts from being looked up at all.
2368 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to call DNS
2369 on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the address is valid.
2372 <h2><a name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with majordomo?</a></h2>
2374 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the majordomo
2375 alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that the mail it
2376 receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user name. A normal
2377 virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the default mailbox,
2378 rather than expansion through majordomo.
2380 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for dealing
2381 with this case that pairs a run control file like this:
2384 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2386 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2387 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2388 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2391 with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:
2394 #############################################
2395 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2396 #############################################
2398 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2400 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2401 ---------------------------
2403 -------------------------
2404 # handle virtual users
2406 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2407 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2408 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2409 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2410 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2413 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses of incoming
2414 mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to work. Michael
2418 I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the default ISP
2419 user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts + majordomo on my
2420 inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail 8.83
2424 <h2><a name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses from
2425 my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2427 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2428 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2429 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2432 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2434 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2435 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2436 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2437 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.
2439 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra Received
2440 lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the optional
2441 skip prefix argument of the `envelope' option; you may need to say
2442 something like `<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or `<code>envelope 2
2445 <h3>The `by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2447 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like
2450 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2451 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2452 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2455 it checks to see if `iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your mailserver
2456 before accepting `ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope address. This
2457 check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or if you were using `no dns'
2458 and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net as an alias of your server.
2461 <h2><a name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of messages.</a></h2>
2463 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you have
2464 N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2465 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box. Since
2466 they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail delivers N
2467 copies to each user.
2469 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2470 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2471 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2472 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the case,
2473 but the latter condition sometimes fails in a timing-dependent way if
2474 the server was processing multiple incoming mail streams.
2476 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all message-IDs
2477 received during a poll so far and dropping any message that matches a
2478 seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2) operation that
2479 might significantly slow down the retrieval of large mail batches.
2482 <h2><a name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2484 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2485 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2486 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2487 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local delivery) is
2488 failing to recognize it as a header.
2490 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is installing
2491 a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't work, try to
2492 figure out which other program in your mail path is inserting the
2493 blank line and replace that. If you can't do either of these things,
2494 pick a different MDA (such as procmail) and declare it with the
2495 `<CODE>mda</CODE>' option.
2498 <h2><a name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject line.</a></h2>
2500 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2501 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2502 the server and choked on by an old version of <em>deliver</em>).
2504 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't process
2505 X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can suggest is
2506 replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not RFC822 conformant.
2509 <h2><a name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.</a></h2>
2511 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox, then this
2512 is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side SMTP listener or
2513 your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split messages.
2515 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split messages on
2516 From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of the BSD popper
2517 program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and elsewhere) is broken this way.
2519 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of `cat' and send yourself one
2520 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2521 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2524 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages either.
2525 What's probably happening is either sendmail's local delivery agent or
2526 your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant and are breaking
2527 messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From headers. You can
2528 figure out which by looking at your client-side mailbox with vi or
2529 more. If the message is already split in your mailbox, your local
2530 delivery agent is the problem. If it's not, your mailreader is the
2533 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2534 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like
2537 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2540 describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the `E' option in the
2541 flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail turn each dangerous
2542 start-of-line From into a >From, preventing programs further downstream
2546 <h2><a name="X4">X4.</a><a name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and different way</a></h2>
2548 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing the
2549 mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail that are
2550 actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so please go through
2551 this diagnostic sequence before sending us a complaint.
2553 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the order
2554 they pass your mail:
2557 <li> Programs upstream of your server mailbox.
2558 <li> The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.
2559 <li> The fetchmail program itself.
2560 <li> Your local sendmail.
2561 <li> Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2562 specified by <code>mda</CODE>.
2565 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it exposes
2566 pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your downstream
2567 software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need to pin down
2568 exactly where the message is being garbled in order to deduce what is
2571 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and retrieve it
2572 with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or by running with
2573 the equivalent command-line options):
2576 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2579 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except for (a)
2580 the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b) header address
2581 changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any end-of-line changes
2582 due to the <code>forcecr</code> and <code>stripcr</code> options.
2583 MBOX will in fact contain what programs downstream of fetchmail
2586 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and misconfigurations in
2587 those downstream programs. If MBOX looks unmangled, you will know
2588 that is what is going on and that it is not fetchmail's problem. Take
2589 a look at the other FAQ items in this section for possible clues about
2590 how to fix your problem.
2592 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with your
2593 actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
2594 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
2595 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server mailbox
2596 are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you can do about
2597 this aside from complaining to your site postmaster, and nothing at
2598 all fetchmail can do about it!
2600 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that case
2601 either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling. To
2602 determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and simulate
2603 a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard (both POP3
2604 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols) but requires
2605 some attention to detail. You should be able to use a fetchmail -v
2606 log as a model for a session, but remember that the "*" in your LOGIN
2607 or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your actual password.
2609 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
2610 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then your
2611 server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
2612 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
2613 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send
2614 us a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
2615 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
2616 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
2619 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
2620 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
2621 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
2622 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
2623 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry on
2624 <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.
2627 <h2><a name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too much!</a></h2>
2629 <p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before 4.4.8.
2630 Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than RETR, in order
2631 to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen is helpful for
2632 later recovery if you lose your connection in the middle of a
2635 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad interaction
2636 with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP bounds check was
2637 fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP argument. Decrementing the
2638 TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.
2640 <p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.
2642 <p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
2643 this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.
2646 <h2><a name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or mangled.</a></h2>
2648 <p>This isn't fetchmail's doing -- fetchmail never drops lines in message
2649 bodies or attachments. It may be your POP server, or it may be the
2650 sender's mail user agent (or a bad combination of both).
2652 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP servers
2653 are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading messages.
2654 We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
2655 Outlook servers. Windows- and NT-based POP servers seem especially
2656 prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one of these,
2657 replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the only
2660 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
2661 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
2662 headers introducing type application/pdf, mangling the type
2663 to application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types
2666 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
2667 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino 5.0.2b).
2668 It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape Messenger and
2669 other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole message. When
2670 fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH RFC822.TEXT to get first
2671 the header and then the body, Domino generates different Boundary tags
2672 for each part, .e.g. one tag is declared in the Content-type header and
2673 another is used to separate the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't
2674 work. (I have heard a rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed
2675 in Domino release 6; you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)
2677 <p>Another rich source of attachment problems is Microsoft Exchange and
2678 Microsoft Outlook. If you see unreadable attachments with a
2679 ContentType of "application/x-tnef", you're having this problem. The
2680 <a href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility
2683 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail user
2684 agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big offender is Sun
2685 MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough like MIME that some
2686 programs could get confused; these are generated by the mailtool and
2687 dtmail programs (the mail programs in Sun's OpenWindows and CDE
2690 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME attachments is
2691 the <a href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
2693 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
2694 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for
2695 converting character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment
2696 formats. At this writing, emil does not appear to have been
2697 maintained since a patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is
2700 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
2701 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
2702 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be able
2703 to fix the problem, in which case the message is unchanged.
2705 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using emil
2710 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
2711 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
2712 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
2713 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
2715 LOG="Converting $MATCH
2718 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
2719 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
2723 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail that if
2724 any one of the four listed expressions is found in the message, the
2725 total condition is considered true, and the message gets passed into
2726 emil. These four subconditions check whether the message has a Sun
2727 attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded attachment; there are
2728 others that could be added to check these things better and to check
2729 other relevant conditions. The "LOG=" line writes a line into the
2730 procmail log; the lone double-quote beginning the following line makes
2731 sure the log entry gets an end-of-line character. The call to gawk
2732 (GNU awk) is for fixing end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes
2733 leaves those in the format of the originating machine; it could
2734 probably be replaced with a sed subsitution.
2736 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:
2739 <li> BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments
2740 <li> Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)
2741 <li> Base64 Encoding for binary attachments
2742 <li> iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
2743 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)
2744 <li> Quoted-Printable encoding for headers
2745 <li> MIME attachment format
2748 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set and the
2749 Apple binary format) are as they should be for good internet
2750 interoperability.<p>
2752 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
2753 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
2754 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
2755 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending attachments
2756 (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the world doesn't
2757 understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be used at all),
2758 and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than mailtool's format.
2761 <h2><a name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging fetchmail.</a></h2>
2763 <p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know anything
2764 about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any differently from
2767 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your network
2768 transport layer's capability to handle the very large TCP/IP packets
2769 that attachments tend to turn into. You can test this theory by trying to
2770 download the offending message through a webmail account; using HTTP
2771 for the message tends to simulate large-packet stress rather well, and
2772 you will probably find that the messages that seem to be choking
2773 fetchmail will make your HTTP download speed drop to zero.
2775 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the packet-reassembly
2776 layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't manifest at normal
2777 packet sizes. It may also be caused by malfunctioning path-MTU
2778 discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's a modem in the link,
2779 it may be because the attachment contains the Hayes mode escape "+++".
2782 <h2><a name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my messages.</a></h2>
2784 <p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
2785 Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
2786 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%. Most
2787 of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an SMTP
2788 server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at message end.
2790 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange mail
2791 server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what happens:
2793 <p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the message
2794 contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with, e.g.
2797 <p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes the
2798 end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing, which
2799 is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as part of the
2800 email body, Interchange throws out the whole "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves
2801 the email body without any line terminator at the end of it. RFC821
2802 does not forbid this, though it probably should.
2804 <p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message. IMAP
2805 returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to the
2806 protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because the
2807 message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client sees:
2811 where the ')' is from IMAP.
2813 <p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
2814 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.
2816 <p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts it
2817 at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity on,
2818 you'll get a message about actual != expected.
2820 <p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
2821 href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.
2824 <h2><a name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
2826 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice for
2827 system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing the log,
2828 without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To get around
2829 it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail (this will have
2830 no effect on the contents of the logfile if it already exists).
2833 <h2><a name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
2834 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
2836 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery, which
2837 Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of new messages
2838 is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should be a ``biff''
2839 command to control this. Type
2845 to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command
2851 which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
2852 doesn't work, comment out any reference to ``comsat'' in your
2853 /etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.
2855 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile is
2867 to solve the problem system-wide.
2870 <h2><a name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll cycle?</a></h2>
2872 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify your rc
2873 file and restart, reading it.
2876 <h2><a name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
2877 a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
2879 <p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an IMAP
2880 with a long expunge interval.
2882 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed until
2883 you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot fix this,
2884 because doing it right takes cooperation from the server. There are
2885 two possible remedies:
2887 <p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
2888 the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
2889 doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as well
2890 as on processing a QUIT command.
2892 <p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
2893 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
2894 command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages immediately
2895 after they are downloaded.
2897 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
2898 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
2899 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
2900 the next time you complete a successful query.
2903 <h2><a name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
2905 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the sending
2906 SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that address.
2908 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL FROM
2909 address naming a different host than the originating site for your
2910 connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to help
2911 prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site. (RFC 1123
2912 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)
2914 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
2915 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf on
2916 any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!
2918 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall back to
2919 the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky, the log
2923 <h2><a name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
2925 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and also each
2926 time it gets a HELO in listener mode.
2928 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups to
2929 fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
2930 <code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
2931 fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>, and
2932 that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably also want
2933 your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.
2935 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
2936 with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.
2938 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may help,
2939 and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well. Switching to
2940 a faster MTA like qmail or exim might help.
2943 <h2><a name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted order?</a></h2>
2945 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail in.
2947 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the order
2948 that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything about
2949 this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.
2951 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to sort
2952 messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics of
2953 fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and transparent a
2954 pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather than emphasize, the
2955 differences between the remote-fetch protocols it uses.
2957 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.
2960 <h2><a name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option working?</a></h2>
2962 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse fetchmail.
2963 If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd has an idle
2964 timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
2965 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
2966 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that fetchmail
2967 relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its own delay
2968 interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever reaching its
2972 <h2><a name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same messages
2973 over and over?</a></h2>
2975 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the <cite>keep</cite>
2976 and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have, turn <cite>keep</cite> off.
2978 <p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL feature
2979 that can lead to all your old messages being seen again after a line
2980 drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL code breaks
2981 worse every time I touch it. The problem is fundamental; maintaining
2982 and garbage-collecting the right kind of client-side state is just
2983 hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and removed LAST should be hung
2984 up by his thumbs and whipped with scorpions. The right answers are
2985 either (a) live with the occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4,
2986 or (c) fix the code yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose
2987 (c), I don't want to hear about it.
2989 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to your
2990 mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and many,
2991 especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your fetchmail is
2992 able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox is write-locked
2993 by the other instance yours can neither mark messages seen or delete them.
2994 The solution is to either (a) wait for the other client to finish, or (b)
2997 <p>James Stevens <James.Stevens@kyzo.com> writes:<p>
3000 <p>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from an NT POP3
3001 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting each e-mail
3002 one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very unreliable and
3003 would often just drop out in the middle of a session.
3005 <p>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated normally
3006 (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll back all the
3009 <p>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just end up
3010 continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or, if the
3011 queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
3012 connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back any
3013 deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the first few
3014 e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became fuller and fuller
3015 the chances of getting a connection long enough to collect theentire
3016 mailbox became smaller and smaller.
3018 <p>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5 or 10)
3019 e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3 connection is
3020 terminated correctly.
3023 <p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
3024 to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
3025 switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.
3028 <h2><a name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the same?</a></h2>
3030 This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking the received
3031 date from the last Received header.<p>
3034 <table width="100%" cellpadding=0><tr>
3035 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home Page</a>
3036 <td width="30%" align=center>To <a href="/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
3037 <td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 2002/05/24 06:47:21 $
3040 <ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>
3045 compile-command: "(cd ~/WWW; upload fetchmail/fetchmail-FAQ.html)"