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17 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2008-11-16</td>
24 <a href="index.html" title="Main">Main</a><br />
25 <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Features</a><br />
26 <a href="fetchmail-man.html">Manual</a><br />
27 <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html" title="Fetchmail FAQ">FAQ</a><br />
28 <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.pdf" title="Fetchmail FAQ as PDF">FAQ (PDF)</a><br />
29 <a href="design-notes.html">Design Notes</a><br />
30 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">Download</a><br />
31 <a href="http://mknod.org/svn/fetchmail/">Development Code</a><br />
32 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">Project Page</a><br />
38 <img src="bighand.png" width="100" height="71" alt="logo: a hand presenting an envelope" align="right" />
42 <div style="background-color:#ffffff;color:#008000;"> <h1>fetchmail 6.3.6 release candidate #5</h1>
44 href="http://mandree.home.pages.de/fetchmail/">fetchmail-6.3.6-rc5 was released</a>, fixing several annoying bugs. <a href="http://mandree.home.pages.de/fetchmail/NEWS-6.3.6-rc5.txt">Click here for details.</a></p> </div>
47 <div style="background-color:#c0ffc0;color:#000000;">
48 <h1>NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.9 RELEASE</h1>
49 <p>On 2008-11-16, <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">fetchmail-6.3.9
50 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing
51 various bugs, among them the security issues CVE-2008-2711 and
52 CVE-2007-4565, and two critical bugs. <a
53 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=15418">Click
54 here to see the change details.</a>
59 <div style="background-color:#ffff80;color:#000000;font-size:80%;">
60 <h1>FETCHMAIL 6.2.X UNSUPPORTED AND VULNERABLE - USE 6.3.X INSTEAD</h1>
61 <p>fetchmail 6.2.X versions are susceptible to CVE-2006-5867 and CVE-2007-1558 and should be replaced by the most current 6.3.X version. Support has been discontinued as of 2006-01-22.</p>
66 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
67 <p style="font-size:100%">These security issues (listed immediately below) have become
68 known to the fetchmail maintainer to the date mentioned above. Note
69 that fetchmail 6.2.X and older are no longer supported and contain
70 some of the problems mentioned below, even if they aren't mentioned
71 in the security announcements:</p>
73 <li><a name="cve-2008-2711" href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2008-2711">CVE-2008-2711:</a> Fetchmail can <a href="fetchmail-SA-2008-01.txt">crash in verbose mode when logging long message headers.</a> This bug will be fixed in release 6.3.9. For the nonce, use the <a href="fetchmail-SA-2008-01.txt">patch contained in the security announcement.</a></li>
74 <li><a name="cve-2007-4565" href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-4565">CVE-2007-4565:</a> Fetchmail can <a href="fetchmail-SA-2007-02.txt">crash when the SMTP server refuses a warning message generated by fetchmail.</a> This bug was introduced in fetchmail 4.6.8 and will be fixed in release 6.3.9. For the nonce, use the <a href="fetchmail-SA-2007-02.txt">patch contained in this security announcement.</a></li>
75 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-1558">CVE-2007-1558:</a> Fetchmail's APOP client was found to <a href="fetchmail-SA-2007-01.txt">validate APOP challenges insufficiently, making man-in-the-middle attacks on APOP secrets unnecessarily easier than need be.</a> This bug was long-standing, fetchmail 6.3.8 validates the APOP challenge stricter.</li>
76 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-5974">CVE-2006-5974:</a> Fetchmail was found to <a href="fetchmail-SA-2006-03.txt">crash when refusing a message that was bound to be delivered by an MDA.</a> This bug was introduced into fetchmail 6.3.5 and fixed in 6.3.6.</li>
77 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-5867">CVE-2006-5867:</a> Fetchmail was found to <a href="fetchmail-SA-2006-02.txt">omit TLS or send the password in clear text despite the configuration stating otherwise.</a> This was a long-standing bug reported by Isaac Wilcox, fixed in fetchmail 6.3.6. There will be no 6.2.X releases to fix this bug in 6.2.X.</li>
78 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2006-0321">CVE-2006-0321:</a> Fetchmail was found to <a href="fetchmail-SA-2006-01.txt">crash after bouncing a message with bad addresses. This bug was introduced with fetchmail 6.3.0 and fixed in fetchmail 6.3.2.</a></li>
79 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2005-4348">CVE-2005-4348:</a> Fetchmail was found to contain <a href="fetchmail-SA-2005-03.txt">a bug (null pointer dereference) that can be exploited to a denial of service attack</a> when fetchmail runs in multidrop mode. 6.2.5.5 and 6.3.1 have this bug fixed.</li>
80 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2005-3088">CVE-2005-3088:</a> Fetchmailconf was found to <a href="fetchmail-SA-2005-02.txt">open the configuration files world-readable, writing data to them, and only then tightening up permissions</a>, which may cause password information to be visible to other users. This bug affected fetchmail 6.2.0, 6.2.5 and 6.2.5.2. The bug is fixed in fetchmail 6.2.5.4 and 6.3.0.</li>
81 <li><a href="http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2005-2335">CVE-2005-2335:</a> Fetchmail was found to contain a <a href="fetchmail-SA-2005-01.txt">remotely exploitable code injection vulnerability (potentially privileged code)</a> in the POP3 code, affecting both the 6.2.0 and 6.2.5 releases. 6.2.5.2, 6.2.5.4 and 6.3.0 have got this bug fixed. (Other versions have not been checked if they contain this bug.)</li>
84 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update to fetchmail version 6.3.9</a>.</strong></p>
88 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
90 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
91 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
92 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
93 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
94 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
95 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
96 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
98 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
99 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
100 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
101 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
102 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
104 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
105 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
106 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
107 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
108 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
109 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
111 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
112 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
113 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
114 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
115 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
117 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
118 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
119 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
120 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
122 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
123 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
124 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
125 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
127 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
128 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
129 Pentium under Linux.</p>
131 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
132 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
135 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
137 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
138 about what fetchmail does.</p>
140 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
143 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
144 troubleshooting help.</p>
146 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
147 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
149 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
150 of known problems and requested features.</p>
152 <p>The developers use <a
153 href="http://subversion.tigris.org/">Subversion</a> for revision control.
154 To get the latest development version, point your subversion client at <a
155 href="http://mknod.org/svn/fetchmail/trunk/">http://mknod.org/svn/fetchmail/trunk/</a>.</p>
158 href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
159 page</a> for more, including <a
160 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.
161 (However, note that we no longer use the subversion repository that Berlios provides.)</p>
163 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
166 There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
167 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
168 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
169 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>. There is also a
170 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
171 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
172 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
173 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
174 Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
175 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
176 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
178 <p>Note: before submitting a question to the lists, <strong>please read
179 the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
180 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report bugs). We
181 tend to get the same three newbie questions over and over again. The
182 FAQ covers them like a blanket.</p>
184 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
185 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
186 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
187 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
188 adding IMAP support.</p>
189 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
190 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
191 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
192 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
193 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
194 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
195 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
197 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
199 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
200 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
202 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
203 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
204 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
205 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
206 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
208 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
209 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
210 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
211 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
212 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
214 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
216 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
217 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
218 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
219 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
221 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
222 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
223 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
225 <h1>Related works</h1>
227 <h2>Similar software</h2>
229 <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>.
231 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
232 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
233 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
234 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
235 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
236 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
239 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
241 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
243 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
244 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
245 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
246 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
247 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
248 the contents of headers.</p>
251 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
252 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
253 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
256 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
257 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
258 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
259 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
262 <p>There's a program called
263 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
264 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
265 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
267 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
268 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
269 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
270 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
271 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
272 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
276 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de">
277 <img src="http://developer.berlios.de/bslogo.php?group_id=1824&type=1" width="124" height="32" border="0" alt="BerliOS Logo" align="right" /></a>