- fetchmail README
+fetchmail README
+================
-fetchmail is a free, full-featured, robust, well-documented remote
-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
-on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It
-retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it to your local
-(client) machine's delivery system, so it can then be be read by
-normal mail user agents such as elm(1) or Mail(1).
+Introduction
+------------
-fetchmail supports standard all mail-retrieval protocols in use on the
-Internet: POP2, POP3 (including POP3 with RFC1938 one-time passwords),
-RPOP, APOP, KPOP, Compuserve's POP3 with RPA, Microsoft's NTLM, Demon
-Internet's SDPS, all flavors of IMAP (including IMAP4rev1 with RFC1731
-Kerberos v4 or GSSAPI authentication or CRAM-MD5 authentication), and
-ESMTP ETRN. Fetchmail also supports end-to-end encryption with OpenSSL.
+Fetchmail is a free, full-featured, robust, well-documented remote mail
+retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP
+links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It retrieves mail from remote mail
+servers and forwards it to your local (client) machine's delivery system, so it
+can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as mutt(1), elm(1) or
+Mail(1).
-The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
-extensively tested under the BSD variants, AIX, HP-UX versions 9 and
-10, SunOS, Solaris, NEXTSTEP, OSF 3.2, IRIX, and Rhapsody.
+Fetchmail supports all standard mail-retrieval protocols in use on the
+Internet: POP3 (including some variants such as RPOP, APOP, KPOP), IMAP4rev1
+(also IMAP4, IMAP2bis), POP2, IMAP4, ETRN, and ODMR. On the output side,
+fetchmail supports ESMTP/SMTP, LMTP, and invocation of a local delivery agent.
-It should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it uses GNU
-autoconf). It has been ported to LynxOS and will build there without
-special action. It has also been ported to QNX; to build under QNX,
-see the header comments in the Makefile. It is reported to build and
-run under AmigaOS.
+Fetchmail also fully supports authentication via GSSAPI, Kerberos 4 and 5,
+RFC1938 one-time passwords, Compuserve's POP3 with RPA, Microsoft's NTLM, Demon
+Internet's SDPS, or CRAM-MD5 authentication a la RFC2195.
-Fetchmail is Y2K safe.
+Fetchmail supports end-to-end encryption with OpenSSL, do read README.SSL for
+details on fetchmail's configuration and README.SSL-SERVER for server-side
+requirements. NOTE! To be compatible with earlier releases, fetchmail 6.4
+default behaviour is more relaxed than dictated by recommendations - while it
+does away with SSLv2, only negotiates SSLv3 if forced to, it will by default
+still negotiate TLS v1.0.
-See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS
-for detailed information on recent changes, NOTES for design notes, and
-TODO for a list of things that still need doing.
+Portability
+-----------
-The fetchmail code appears to be stable and free of bugs affecting
-normal operation (that is, retrieving from POP3 or IMAP in single-drop
-mode and forwarding via SMTP to sendmail). It will probably undergo
-substantial change only if and when support for a new retrieval
-protocol or authentication mode is added.
+The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been extensively
+tested under the BSD variants, AIX, HP-UX versions 9 and 10, SunOS, Solaris,
+NEXTSTEP, OSF 3.2, IRIX, and Rhapsody once upon a time.
-You can easily fetch the latest version of fetchmail via FTP from the
-following FTP directory:
+The current maintainer does not have access to these systems, and assumes that
+the system is at least Single-Unix-Specification V3 compatible, and that
+will also require a C99 compiler. A further requirement is that
+either realpath() permits its 2nd argument to be NULL for auto-allocation,
+or that otherwise PATH_MAX be defined.
- ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/fetchmail
+Fetchmail should be able to be compiled with C99, C11, C++98, C++03,
+C++11, C++14 compilers, but not C++17 because the "register" keyword is
+used in some parts of the code.
-Or you can get it from the fetchmail home page:
+Future fetchmail releases will require modern language features such as
+"long long" and others, so this release is the last to support C89.
- http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail
+Further reading
+---------------
-Enjoy!
+The INSTALL file describes how to configure and install fetchmail.
+
+See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS for
+detailed information on recent changes, NOTES for design notes, and TODO for
+a list of things that still need doing. If you want to hack on this code,
+a list of known bugs and to-do items can be found in the file todo.html.
+
+Status, source code
+-------------------
+
+The fetchmail code appears to be stable and free of bugs affecting normal
+operation (that is, retrieving from POP3 or IMAP in single-drop mode and
+forwarding via SMTP to a local mail transfer agent).
- -- esr
+You can get the code from the fetchmail home page:
+
+ https://www.fetchmail.info/
+ https://fetchmail.sourceforge.io/
+
+Enjoy!
+ -- esr, ma
projects / ~andy / fetchmail / blobdiff