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18 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2010-04-06</td>
25 <a href="index.html" title="Main">Main</a><br>
26 <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Features</a><br>
27 <a href="fetchmail-man.html">Manual</a><br>
28 <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html" title="Fetchmail FAQ">FAQ</a><br>
29 <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.pdf" title="Fetchmail FAQ as PDF">FAQ (PDF)</a><br>
30 <a href="design-notes.html">Design Notes</a><br>
31 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">Download</a><br>
32 <a href="security.html">Security</a><br>
33 <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail/">Development</a><br>
34 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">Project Page</a><br>
40 <img src="bighand.png" width="100" height="71" alt="logo: a hand presenting an envelope" align="right">
44 <div style="background-color:#c0ffc0;color:#000000;">
45 <h1>NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.16 RELEASE</h1>
47 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">fetchmail-6.3.16
48 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
49 regression of the --interface option from 6.3.15, and improving SSL compatibility with sites
50 using non-mandatory algorithms.
51 It is a recommended update for all users. <a
52 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=17413">Click
53 here to see the change details.</a>
57 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
58 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
59 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
62 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
63 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
64 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
68 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
70 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
71 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
72 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
73 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
74 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
75 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
76 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
78 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
79 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
80 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
81 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
82 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
84 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
85 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
86 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
87 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
88 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
89 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
91 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
92 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
93 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
94 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
95 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
97 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
98 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
99 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
100 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
102 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
103 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
104 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
105 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
107 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
108 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
109 Pentium under Linux.</p>
111 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
112 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
115 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
117 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
118 about what fetchmail does.</p>
120 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
123 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
124 troubleshooting help.</p>
126 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
127 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
129 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
130 of known problems and requested features.</p>
132 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
133 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
134 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
136 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
137 page</a> for more, including <a
138 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
140 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
142 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
143 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
144 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
145 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
148 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
149 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
150 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
151 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
153 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
154 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
155 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
156 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
157 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
158 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
159 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
161 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
162 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
163 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
164 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
165 adding IMAP support.</p>
166 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
167 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
168 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
169 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
170 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
171 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
172 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
174 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
176 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
177 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
179 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
180 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
181 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
182 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
183 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
185 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
186 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
187 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
188 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
189 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
191 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
193 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
194 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
195 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
196 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
198 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
199 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
200 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
202 <h1>Related works</h1>
204 <h2>Similar software</h2>
206 <p><strong>fdm:</strong> A recently appeared software package that integrates basic filtering is <a href="http://fdm.sourceforge.net/">Nicholas Marriott's fdm</a>.
208 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
209 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
210 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
211 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
212 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
213 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
216 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
218 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
220 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
221 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
222 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
223 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
224 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
225 the contents of headers.</p>
228 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
229 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
230 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
233 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
234 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
235 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
236 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
239 <p>There's a program called
240 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
241 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
242 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
244 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
245 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
246 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
247 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
248 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
249 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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