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18 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2011-08-21</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/Errata</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 6.3.21 RELEASE</h1>
47 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824&release_id=18743">fetchmail-6.3.21
48 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
49 denial-of service in STARTTLS and makes --keep configurations log
51 <br>It is a recommended <strong>security update</strong> for all users and
53 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=18743">Click
54 here to see the change details.</a>
57 <h1>SSL issues after upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0?</h1>
58 <p>If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
59 library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run <kbd>c_rehash
60 /path/to/certs</kbd>, where the last part is whatever argument
61 you give to fetchmail's <code>sslcertpath</code> option. Details:
63 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#R14">see fetchmail's FAQ item
68 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
69 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
70 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
73 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
74 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
75 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
79 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
81 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
82 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
83 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
84 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
85 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
86 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
87 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
89 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
90 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
91 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
92 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
93 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
95 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
96 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
97 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
98 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
99 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
100 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
102 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
103 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
104 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
105 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
106 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
108 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
109 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
110 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
111 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
113 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
114 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
115 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
116 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
118 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
119 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
120 Pentium under Linux.</p>
122 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
123 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
126 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
128 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
129 about what fetchmail does.</p>
131 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
134 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
135 troubleshooting help.</p>
137 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
138 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
140 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
141 of known problems and requested features.</p>
143 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
144 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
145 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
147 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
148 page</a> for more, including <a
149 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
151 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
153 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
154 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
155 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
156 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
159 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
160 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
161 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
162 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
164 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
165 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
166 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
167 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
168 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
169 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
170 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
172 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
173 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
174 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
175 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
176 adding IMAP support.</p>
177 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
178 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
179 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
180 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
181 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
182 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
183 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
185 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
187 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
188 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
190 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
191 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
192 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
193 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
194 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
196 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
197 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
198 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
199 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
200 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
202 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
204 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
205 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
206 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
207 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
209 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
210 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
211 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
213 <h1>Related works</h1>
215 <h2>Similar software</h2>
217 <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>.
219 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
220 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
221 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
222 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
223 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
224 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
227 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
229 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
231 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
232 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
233 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
234 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
235 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
236 the contents of headers.</p>
239 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
240 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
241 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
244 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
245 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
246 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
247 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
250 <p>There's a program called
251 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
252 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
253 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
255 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
256 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
257 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
258 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
259 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
260 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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