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-<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/06/08 07:39:16 $
+<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/08/21 06:04:18 $
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<HR>
<H1>Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</H1>
<a href="#G12">G12. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br>
-
<h1>Build-time problems:</h1>
<a href="#B1">B1. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br>
<a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.</a><br>
<a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br>
<a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br>
+<a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade</a><br>
+<a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
+messages but before deleting them</a><br>
<h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as near
bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.<p>
+Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
+href="http://gnu.org//copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
+License</a>.<p>
+
If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for fetchmail's
full feature list.<p>
sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even Microsoft
itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail service runs
over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John Kirch's excellent <a
-href="http://www.kirch.net/unix-nt.html">white paper</a> on Unix
+href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white paper</a> on Unix
vs. NT performance.<P>
You can find sources for IMAP software at <a
<hr>
<h2><a name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
-So put string quotes around it. :-)<p>
+Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes around it. :-)<p>
-The configuration file parser treats any all-numeric token as a
-number, which will confuse it when it's expecting a name. String
-quoting forces the token's class.<p>
+The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions treated any
+all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when it was
+expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's class.<p>
+
+The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
+any token following "username" or "password" is a string.
<hr>
<h2><a name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with `no'.</a></h2>
-You're caught in an unfortunate crack between the newer-style syntax
-for negated options (`no keep', `no rewrite' etc.) and the older style
-run-on syntax (`nokeep', `norewrite' etc.).<p>
+See <a href="#F2">F2</a> You're caught in an unfortunate crack between
+the newer-style syntax for negated options (`no keep', `no rewrite'
+etc.) and the older style run-on syntax (`nokeep', `norewrite'
+etc.).<p>
-You can work around this easily. Just put string quotes around your
+Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes around your
token.<p>
-I haven't fixed this because there is no good fix for it short of
-implementing a token pushback stack in the lexer. That's more
-additional complexity than I'm willing to add to banish a very
-marginal bug with an easy workaround.<p>
-
<hr>
<h2><a name="F4">F4. I'm migrating from popclient. How do I need to modify my .poprc?</a></h2>
accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere <babydr@nwrain.net> for
it.<p>
+Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up and
+ppp-down scripts of pppd.<p>
+
<hr>
<h2><a name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
but a string matching the user host name is likely.<p>
-
+
To use this line you must:<p>
<ol>
in the alias directory (normally /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:<p>
<pre>
- | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST}"
+ | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"
</pre>
Note this <em>does</em> require a modern /bin/sh.<p>
+Peter Wilson adds: <P>
+
+``My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means that I
+need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is due to
+qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is handled by the
+file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or ~user/.qmail-default).''<p>
+
Luca Olivetti adds:<P>
If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up the
<hr>
<h2><a name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
+<h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
+
+You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user from
+Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username consisting of your
+Demon user name followed by your account name, with an at-sign between
+them.<P>
+
+For example, to download email for the user <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>,
+you could use the following .fetchmailrc file:<P>
+
+<pre>
+set postmaster "philh"
+poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
+ user "philh@vision25" is philh
+</pre>
+
+<h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
+
Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All messages
have a Received: header added when they enter the maildrop, like this:
<h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
-There's a different way to solve this problem. It's not necessary on
-Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but the
-person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful if
-Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.<P>
+There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on Demon
+Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but the person
+who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful if Demon
+Internet ever changes mail transports.<P>
SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the envelope of a
message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports if compiled with the
fault of our own, and someone informs us of their location, we can
provide the URL pointing to archive sites outside of the U.S.<P>
-Newer versions of the SSL patches make appear in the "incoming" directory
+Newer versions of the SSL patches make appear in the `new' directory
and stay there a while until they can be processed and moved to the SSL
-directory. Check for patches in "incoming" if you do not find patches
-for the latest release.<P>
+directory. Check for patches in `new' if you do not find patches
+for the latest fetchmail release.<P>
<hr>
<h2><a name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
mru 552
</pre>
+<hr>
+<a name="R8">R8. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
+
+In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment changed
+from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move your
+.fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the file.
+(Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian systems.)<P>
+
+<hr>
+<h2><a name="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
+messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
+
+There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly other
+recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel writes:<p>
+
+<blockquote>
+TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's now the
+default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment.
+When the tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460,
+and then fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because
+is is not allowing for the timestamp.<p>
+
+Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time (typically 2
+minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next (fragmented)
+packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the fragmentation and
+restores normal behaviour. To do this, [execute]<p>
+
+echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps<p>
+
+I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At least
+[now] I am now getting good performance and no queue blocking.
+</blockquote>
+
<hr>
<h2><a name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
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-<td width="30%" align=right>$Date: 1999/06/08 07:39:16 $
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<P><ADDRESS>Eric S. Raymond <A HREF="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@snark.thyrsus.com></A></ADDRESS>