3 # indexgen.sh -- generate current version of fetchmail home page.
7 version=`sed -n <Makefile.in "/VERSION *= */s/VERSION *= *\([^ ]*\)/\1/p"`
8 date=`date "+%d %b %Y"`
10 set -- `timeseries | grep -v "[%#]" | head -1`
13 set -- `ls -ks fetchmail`
15 set -- `(cd /lib; ls libc-*)`
16 glibc=`echo $1 | sed 's/libc-\(.*\)\.so/\1/'`
21 # Compute MD5 checksums for security audit
23 for file in fetchmail-$version.tar.gz fetchmail-$version-1.i386.rpm fetchmail-$version-1.src.rpm
25 md5sum $file >>checksums
28 if [ $version != $goldvers ]
30 for file in /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES/fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/fetchmail-$goldvers-1.i386.rpm /usr/src/redhat/SRPMS/fetchmail-$goldvers-1.src.rpm
32 md5sum $file | sed -e "s: .*/: :" >>checksums
36 # Cryptographically sign checksums
38 gpg --clearsign checksums
39 mv checksums.asc checksums
40 gpg --detach-sign --armor fetchmail-$version.tar.gz
44 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
45 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
46 "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
47 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
49 <title>Fetchmail Home Page</title>
50 <link rev=made href=mailto:esr@snark.thyrsus.com />
51 <meta name="description" content="The fetchmail home page." />
52 <meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, POP, POP3, IMAP, IMAP2bis, IMAP4, IMAP4rev1, ETRN, OTP, RPA" />
55 <table width="100%" cellpadding=0 summary="Canned page header"><tr>
56 <td width="30%">Back to
57 <a href="http://$WWWVIRTUAL/~esr/software.html">Software</a>
58 <td width="30%" align=center>Up to <a href="http://$WWWVIRTUAL/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
59 <td width="30%" align=right>$date
63 <table border="10" summary="framed fetchmail logo">
66 <center><img src="bighand.png" alt="fetchmail logo" /></center>
70 <h1>The fetchmail Home Page</h1>
73 <p><b>Note: if you are a stranded fetchmail.com user, we're sorry but
74 we have nothing to do with that site and cannot help you. It's just an
75 unfortunate coincidence of names.</b></p>
77 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
79 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
80 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
81 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
82 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
83 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
84 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
85 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
87 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
88 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
89 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
90 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
91 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
93 <p>Fetchmail offers better security than any other Unix remote-mail
94 client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve RPA, Microsoft NTLM,
95 and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods including CRAM-MD5
96 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be configured to support
97 end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
98 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
100 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
101 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
102 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
103 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
104 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
106 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
107 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
108 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
109 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
111 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
112 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
113 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
114 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
116 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
117 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in ${fetchmailsize}K of core on a
118 Pentium under Linux.</p>
120 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
121 software. The openness of the sources is your strongest possible
122 assurance of quality and reliability.</p>
124 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
126 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
127 about what fetchmail does.</p>
129 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
132 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
133 troubleshooting help.</p>
135 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
136 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
138 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
139 of known problems and requested features.</p>
141 <h1>How to get fetchmail:</h1>
143 <p>You can get any of the following leading-edge resources here:</p>
145 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$version.tar.gz">
146 Gzipped source archive of fetchmail $version</a>
147 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$version-1.i386.rpm">
148 Intel binary RPM of fetchmail $version (uses $glibc)</a>
149 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$version-1.src.rpm">
150 Source RPM of fetchmail $version</a>
153 <p>The <a href="fetchmail-$version.tar.gz.asc">detached GPG
154 signature</a> for the binary tarball can be used to check it for
155 correctness, with the command</p>
158 gpg --verify fetchmail-$version.tar.gz.asc fetchmail-$version.tar.gz
161 <p>MD5 <a href="checksums">checksums</a> are available for these files; the
162 checksum file is cryptographically signed and can be verified with the
166 gpg --verify checksums.asc
171 if [ $version != $goldvers ]
173 cat >>index.html <<EOF
175 <p>Or you can get the last \`gold' version, $goldname:</p>
177 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz">
178 Gzipped source archive of fetchmail $goldname</a>
179 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$goldvers-1.i386.rpm">
180 Intel binary RPM of fetchmail $goldname (uses glibc)</a>
181 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$goldvers-1.alpha.rpm">
182 Alpha binary RPM of fetchmail $goldname (uses glibc)</a>
183 <li> <a href="fetchmail-$goldvers-1.src.rpm">
184 Source RPM of fetchmail $goldname</a>
186 <p>The <a href="fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz.asc">detached GPG signature</a> for the
187 binary tarball can be used to check it for correctness, with the command</p>
190 gpg --verify fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz.asc fetchmail-$goldvers.tar.gz
193 <p>For differences between the leading-edge $version and gold $goldname versions,
194 see the distribution <a href="NEWS">NEWS</a> file.</p>
198 cat >>index.html <<EOF
199 <p>(Note that the binary RPMs don't have the POP2, OTP, IPv6, Kerberos,
200 GSSAPI, Compuserve RPA, Microsoft NTLM, or GNU gettext
201 internationalization support compiled in. To get any of these you
202 will have to build from sources.)</p>
204 <p>The latest version of fetchmail is also carried in the
205 <a href="http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.html">
206 Metalab remote mail tools directory</a>.</p>
208 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
210 <p>There is a fetchmail-friends list for people who want to discuss fixes
211 and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a MailMan
212 list, which you can sign up for at
213 <a href="http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-friends">
214 fetchmail-friends@ccil.org</a>.
215 There is also an announcements-only list,
216 <a href="http://lists.ccil.org/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
217 fetchmail-announce@lists.ccil.org</a>.</p>
219 <p>Note: before submitting a question to the list, <strong>please read
220 the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
221 href="http:fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report bugs). We
222 tend to get the same three newbie questions over and over again. The
223 FAQ covers them like a blanket.</p>
225 <p>Fetchmail was written and is maintained by <a
226 href="../index.html">Eric S. Raymond</a>. There are some designated
227 backup maintainers (<a href="mailto:funk+@osu.edu">Rob Funk</a>, <a
228 href="http://www.dallas.net/~fox/">David DeSimone aka Fuzzy Fox</a>,
229 <a href="mailto:imdave@mcs.net">Dave Bodenstab</a>). Other backup
230 maintainers may be added in the future, in order to ensure continued
231 support should Eric S. Raymond drop permanently off the net for any
234 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
236 <p>I welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
237 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
239 <p>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
240 able help improve fetchmail by lending me a test account on your site.
241 Note that I do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
242 maildrop. Nor am I interested in collecting maildrops per se --
243 what I'm collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</p>
245 <p>Before each release, I run a test harness that sends date-stamped
246 test mail to each site on my regression-test list, then tries to
247 retrieve it. Please take a look at my <a href="testservers.html">
248 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend me an account on a kind
249 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
251 <h1>Who uses fetchmail:</h1>
253 <p>Fetchmail entered full production status with the 2.0.0 version in
254 November 1996 after about five months of evolution from the ancestral
255 <code>popclient</code> utility. It has since come into extremely wide use
256 in the Internet/Unix/Linux community. The Red Hat, Debian and
257 Suse Linux distributions and their derivatives all include it. A
258 customized version is used at Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link. Several
259 large ISPs are known to recommend it to Unix-using SLIP and PPP
262 <p>Somewhere around a thousand people have participated on the fetchmail
263 beta lists (at time of current release there were $subscribers on the
264 friends and announce lists). While it's hard to count the users of
265 open-source software, we can estimate based on (a) population figures
266 at the WELL and other known fetchmail sites, (b) the size of the
267 Linux-using ISP customer base, and (c) the volume of fetchmail-related
268 talk on USENET. These estimates suggest that daily fetchmail users
269 number well into the hundreds of thousands, and possibly over a million.</p>
271 <h1>The sociology of fetchmail:</h1>
273 <p>The fetchmail development project was a sociological experiment as well
274 as a technical effort. I ran it as a test of some theories about why the
275 Linux development model works.</p>
277 <p>I wrote a paper, <a
278 href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/">The
279 Cathedral And The Bazaar</a>, about these theories and the project.
280 I developed the line of analysis it suggested in two later essays.
281 These papers became quite popular and (to my continuing astonishment) may
282 have actually helped change the world. Chase the title link, above,
283 for links to all three papers.</p>
285 <p>I have done some analysis on the information in the project NEWS file.
286 You can view a <a href="history.html">statistical history</a> showing
287 levels of participation and release frequency over time.</p>
289 <h1>Recent releases and where fetchmail is going:</h1>
291 <p>Fetchmail is now sufficiently stable and effective that I'm getting
292 very little pressure to fix things or add features. Development has
293 slowed way down, release frequency has dropped off, and we're
294 basically in maintainance mode.</p>
296 <p>Major changes or additions therefore seem unlikely until there are
297 significant changes in or additions to the related protocol RFCs. One
298 development that would stimulate a new release almost instantly is the
299 deployment of a standard lightweight encrypted authentication method
300 for IMAP sessions.</p>
302 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
304 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
305 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
306 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
307 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
309 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
310 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
311 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well.</p>
313 <h1>Related resources:</h1>
315 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
316 <a href="http://www.ACM.org/~Jochen_Hayek/JHimap_utils/">
317 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
318 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
319 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
320 the contents of headers.</p>
322 <p>Scott Bronson has written a fetchmail plugin (actually, a specialist
324 href="http://www.trestle.com/linux/trestlemail/">trestlemail</a> that
325 helps redirect multidrop mail.</p>
327 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
328 <a href="http://cork.linux.ie/projects/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
329 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
331 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
332 href="http://www.hawkins.emu.id.au/gotmail/">gotmail</a>
333 that can retrieve Hotmail. Another script,
334 <a href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
337 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as \`Steines' has written a
338 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
339 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
340 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
341 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
342 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
344 <h1>Fetchmail's funniest fan letter:</h1>
346 <a href="funny.html">This letter</a> still cracks me up whenever I reread it.
348 <h1>The fetchmail button:</h1>
350 <p>If you use fetchmail and like it, here's a nifty fetchmail button you
351 can put on your web page:</p>
353 <center><img src="fetchmail.png" alt="fetchmail logo" /></center>
355 <p>Thanks to <a href="http://www.gl.umbc.edu/~smatus1/">Steve
356 Matuszek</a> for the graphic design. The hand in the button (and the
357 larger top-of-page graphic) was actually derived from a color scan of
358 the fetchmail author's hand.</p>
360 <h1>Fetchmail mirror sites:</h1>
362 <p>There is a FTP mirror of the current sources and RPMs in Japan at
363 <a href="ftp://ftp.win.ne.jp/pub/network/mail/fetchmail">
364 ftp://ftp.win.ne.jp/pub/network/mail/fetchmail</a>.
366 <h1>Reviews and Awards</h1>
368 <p>Fetchmail was DaveCentral's Best Of Linux winner for
369 <a href="http://linux.davecentral.com/bol_19990630.html">June 30 1999</a>.</p>
371 <p>Fetchmail was a five-star Editor's Pick at Softlandindia.</p>
374 <table width="100%" cellpadding=0 summary="Canned page footer"><tr>
375 <td width="30%">Back to
376 <a href="http://$WWWVIRTUAL/~esr/software.html">Software</a>
377 <td width="30%" align=center>Up to <a href="http://$WWWVIRTUAL/~esr/sitemap.html">Site Map</a>
378 <td width="30%" align=right>$date
382 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@snark.thyrsus.com></a></address>
387 # The following sets edit modes for GNU EMACS