-Popclient README
+ fetchmail README
- $Log: README,v $
- Revision 1.2 1996/06/26 19:08:55 esr
- This is what I sent Harris.
+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).
- Revision 1.1 1996/06/26 15:27:06 esr
- Initial revision
+Fetchmail supports all standard mail-retrieval protocols in use on the
+Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, IMAP2bis, IMAP4, IMAP4rev1
+ESMTP ETRN, and ODMR. 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 also supports end-to-end
+encryption with OpenSSL.
- Revision 1.3 1995/09/07 22:40:58 ceharris
- Final 3.0b4 release
+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.
- Revision 1.2 1995/08/09 01:22:47 ceharris
- Final preparation for 3.0b2 release.
+It should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it uses GNU
+autoconf). It has been ported to LynxOS and BeOS 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.
- Revision 1.1 1995/08/07 21:09:19 ceharris
- Final preparation for popclient 3.0b1 release
+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.
-This is a BETA release of popclient version 3. Little if any user support
-is provided for this version of popclient. Consider this BETA version to
-be a "developer/tester" release only.
+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.
-Release History
+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.
-3.0b7:
+You can get the code from the fetchmail home page:
-Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> hacked on 3.0b6. Here are his change notes:
+ http://fetchmail.berlios.de/
-CONFIGURATION AND BUILDING
+Enjoy!
-* The autoconfigure script incorrectly assumed that all Linuxes use
- /usr/bin/deliver. Under Linux it now checks for both /usr/bin/delivermail
- and /bin/mail.
+ -- esr, ma
-* I added a distribution-maker production to Makefile.in.
-
-OPTIONS AND COMMAND LINE
-
-* I have removed the -p command-line option. Given that there's a .poprc
- facility there is no excuse for encouraging users to put plaintext passwords
- in scripts which might be readable.
-
-* Calling popclient with no arguments now causes it to query or operate
- on every host in the .poprc file.
-
-* I have made --version more useful by having it dump the computed
- connection options for each server specified.
-
-* The user can now explicitly set an MDA (such as procmail) with the
- new option -m or -mda. Various possible MDAs are listed on the man page.
-
-POPRC FILE SYNTAX
-
-* The .poprc lexer now supports "-enclosed strings which may contain
- whitespace.
-
-* I added a --yydebug option to enable .poprc parser debugging at runtime
- if the parser was generated with --debug. It's not documented.
-
-* You may now have a `defaults' entry in .poprc which sets overrideable
- values for other entries. See the man page for details.
-
-* It is now possible to set keep, flush and fetchall in your .poprc file.
-
-* Fixed incorrect numbering of source lines in .poprc parse error messages.
-
-* The configure.in specification no longer uses the obsolete AC_TRY_COMPILE
- macro (it uses AC_TRY_LINK instead).
-
-MAILBOX LOCKING
-
-* I have added mandatory locking of mailbox files where supported.
- This will cover Linux systems, in particular.
-
-* The default behavior is now to do lock-protected append on the user's
- system mailbox rather than using delivermail or some other MDA.
- (This is a performance hack.)
-
-* The autoconfigure script now looks for standard mail locations. The
- default mail delivery agent is used only if it can't find a mail spool
- directory in the standard places.
-
-FUNCTIONAL ENHANCEMENTS
-
-* When using POP3, message headers are edited so that replies won't foo up.
- Anything that looks like a mail ID local to the POP host gets @ and the
- pop servername attached to it before being appended to the user's
- mailbox or passed to an MDA.
-
-* I have implemented daemon mode.
-
-DOCUMENTATION
-
-* All changes and feature additions have been tested in actual use and are
- documented on the man page.
-
-* I have turned the comments in the sample.poprc into a new manual
- section documenting the .poprc format.
-
-MISCELLANEOUS BUG FIXES
-
-* I fixed some de-initialization bugs in pop2.c and pop3.c that led to
- fd leaks (these became painfully obvious when I tested daemon mode!).
-
-* I've fixed the flaky parser error messages. They turned out to be due
- to a misdeclaration of yytext.
-
-There's only one feature I haven't been able to add successfully. I
-want a --logfile option that redirects the daemon-mode output to a
-given file, but the code (in daemon.c near 200) unaccountably doesn't
-work (so I haven't documented it yet).
-
-3.0b5
-o "From " header fix in pop2.c and pop3.c
-o Surpress "..." output when --stdout option specified in pop3.c
-
-3.0b4
-o alloca fix.
-o various diagnostic/informational message fixes.
-
-3.0b3
-o Support for retrieving only new messages from maildrop when
- using POP3.
-o Support for retrieving only the first n lines of each message
- when using POP3.
-o APOP authentication support.
-o Buffered socket input.
-
-3.0b2
- This is a "new features" release.
-o support for .poprc file.
-o GNU-style long options.
-o fixed passwords appearing in 'ps' output
-o support for multiple servers on one command line
-
-3.0b1
- This is mostly a test of the autoconfigure integration.
-Among the functions performed by the new configure script, is
-the ability to detect known system types, configures the mail
-delivery agent (MDA) correctly. This should permanently solve
-the problem of using something other than an MDA for mail
-delivery (which continues to plague Linux slackware 1.2.9).
-For this beta, please check the values of MDA_PATH and MDA_ARGS
-carefully. They should match the values found in your
-sendmail.cf file on the line which begins with "Mlocal".
-
- Other changes from popclient version 2.21:
-
-o no longer uses getpass() from the C library. The
- internal getpassword() function allows the use of long
- passwords.
-
-o integrated GNU getopt() for long options. Long option
- names will appear in a future beta.
-
-o Several compiler warnings fixed.
-
-o Fixed problems related to missing include files in
- Solaris port.
projects / ~andy / fetchmail / blobdiff