- README for fetchmail
+ fetchmail README
-fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented POP2, POP3, APOP,
-and IMAP client originally developed (under the name popclient) by Carl
-Harris <ceharris@mal.com> and now maintained by Eric S. Raymond
-<esr@thyrsus.com>.
+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).
-fetchmail was developed under Linux and should be readily portable to other
-UNIX systems (it uses GNU autoconf). It has also been ported to QNX; to build
-under QNX, see the header comments in the Makefile.
+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.
-You can find the latest version of fetchmail from Eric's home page
+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.
- http://www.ccil.org/~esr
+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.
-Features of fetchmail include:
+Fetchmail is Y2K safe.
- * POP2, POP3, APOP, RPOP and IMAP support with auto-probing for a
- server on the host if no protocol is specified.
+See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS
+for detailed information on recent changes and NOTES for design notes.
- * Easy control via command line or free-format run control file.
+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.
- * Daemon mode -- fetchmail can be run in background to poll
- one or more hosts at a specified interval.
+You can easily fetch the latest version of fetchmail via FTP from the
+following FTP directory:
- * Delivery via via SMTP to the client machine's port 25 (or
- optionally via either file-append with mandatory locking or an
- MDA you specify).
+ ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/fetchmail
- * From:, To:, Cc:, and Reply-To: headers are rewritten so that
- usernames relative to the fetchmail host become fully-qualified
- Internet addresses. This enables replies to work correctly.
+Or you can get it from the fetchmail home page:
+
+ http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail
+
+Enjoy!
-There is a man page at fetchmail.man. A sample rc file is at sample.rcfile.
-For a release history, see the file NEWS.
-- esr
projects / ~andy / fetchmail / blobdiff