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14 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
16 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
21 <h1>Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</h1>
23 <p>Before reporting any bug, please read <a href="#G3">G3</a> for
24 advice on how to include diagnostic information that will get your
25 bug fixed as quickly as possible.</p>
27 <p>If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to
28 this FAQ list, file it to one of the trackers at <a
29 href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">our BerliOS
30 project site</a> or post to one of the fetchmail mailing lists (see
33 <h1>General questions:</h1>
35 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br/>
36 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br/>
37 <a href="#G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
38 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br/>
39 <a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like Outlook Express.</a><br/>
40 <a href="#G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br/>
41 <a href="#G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br/>
42 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
43 <a href="#G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
44 <a href="#G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br/>
45 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a><br/>
46 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br/>
47 <a href="#G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br/>
48 <a href="#G14">G14. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br/>
49 <a href="#G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br/>
50 <a href="#G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br/>
53 <h1>Build-time problems:</h1>
55 <a href="#B1">B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</a><br/>
56 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br/>
57 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br/>
58 <a href="#B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a><br/>
60 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions:</h1>
62 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br/>
63 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br/>
64 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a><br/>
65 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br/>
67 <h1>Configuration questions:</h1>
69 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root
70 on my own machine?</a><br/>
71 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get
72 killed when I log out?</a><br/>
73 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use
74 with --interface?</a><br/>
75 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam
77 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
78 often than others?</a><br/>
79 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not
80 from an init script.</a><br/>
81 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
85 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs:</h1>
87 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br/>
88 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br/>
89 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br/>
90 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br/>
91 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br/>
92 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br/>
93 <a href="#T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a><br/>
94 <a href="#T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a><br/>
96 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers:</h1>
98 <a href="#S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a><br/>
99 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br/>
100 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br/>
101 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br/>
102 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br/>
103 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br/>
104 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br/>
106 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs:</h1>
108 <a href="#I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br/>
109 <a href="#I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br/>
110 <a href="#I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br/>
111 <a href="#I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br/>
112 <a href="#I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a><br/>
113 <a href="#I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br/>
114 <a href="#I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br/>
115 <a href="#I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?</a><br/>
117 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
120 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br/>
121 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br/>
122 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br/>
123 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br/>
124 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br/>
125 <a href="#K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to try TLS if the server
126 advertises it?</a><br/>
128 <h1>Runtime fatal errors:</h1>
130 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows 'SMTP
131 connect failed' messages.</a><br/>
132 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't
134 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
136 <a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
137 normally otherwise.</a><br/>
138 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
140 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
141 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after
142 an OS upgrade</a><br/>
143 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
144 messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
145 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
146 <a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br/>
147 <a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
148 <a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
150 <h1>Hangs and lockups:</h1>
152 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
153 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
155 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
158 <h1>Disappearing mail:</h1>
160 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
161 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
162 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
164 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
165 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
168 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems:</h1>
170 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
171 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
172 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
173 domain properly.</a><br/>
174 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
175 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
176 <a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
178 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
180 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
182 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
183 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
184 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
188 <h1>Mangled mail:</h1>
190 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
191 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
192 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
194 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
195 being split.</a><br/>
196 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
198 <a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
200 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
202 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
204 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
207 <h1>Other problems:</h1>
209 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
210 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
211 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
212 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
213 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
215 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
216 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
217 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
218 not the real From address?</a><br/>
219 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
220 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
221 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
223 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
225 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
226 messages over and over?</a><br/>
227 <a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
229 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
230 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
231 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
232 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
233 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
235 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
241 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
244 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
245 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
246 intermittent PPP or SLIP connection to a remote mailserver. It can
247 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards via port
248 25 to the local SMTP listener, enabling all the normal
249 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local
250 mail or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
252 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
253 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
254 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
255 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
256 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
257 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
259 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
260 software. The openness of the sources is the strongest assurance of
261 quality you can have. Extensive peer review by a large,
262 multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as near
263 bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.</p>
265 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
266 href="http://gnu.org//copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
269 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
270 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
273 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
274 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
276 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
277 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
278 href="http://fetchmail.berlios.de/">http://fetchmail.berlios.de/</a>.
279 You can also usually find both in the <a
280 href="http://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.html">
281 POP mail tools directory on Sunsite</a>.</p>
283 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
284 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
285 may not be completely current.</p>
288 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix
291 <p>Yes I will, provided you include enough diagnostic information
292 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
293 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
294 When reporting bugs, please include the following:</p>
297 <li>Your operating system.</li>
299 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
300 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
303 <li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.</li>
305 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
308 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
310 <li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
311 command-line options you used.</li>
314 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
315 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
316 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
318 <p>Often, the first thing I will do when you report a bug is tell
319 you to upgrade to the newest version of fetchmail, and then see if
320 the problem reproduces. So you'll probably save us both time if you
321 upgrade and test with the latest version <em>before</em> sending in
324 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
325 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
326 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
327 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
328 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
329 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
330 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
331 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
332 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
333 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
334 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
335 introduced -- and with information like that, I can usually come up
336 with a fix very quickly.</p>
338 <p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to
339 test for IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe
340 function of fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf
341 doesn't tell you it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak,
342 poorly-designed protocol with chronic problems, and the later
343 versions after RFC1725 actually get worse rather than better.
344 Changing over to IMAP4 may well make your problem go away -- and if
345 your ISP doesn't have IMAP4 support, bug them to supply it.</p>
347 <p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
348 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
349 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
350 the passwords first!</p>
352 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
353 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
354 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
355 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
356 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
357 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
358 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
359 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
361 <p>A transcript of the failed session with -v -v (yes, that's
362 <em>two</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost always be
363 useful. It is very important that the transcript include your
364 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of
365 server problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords,
366 which are specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be
369 <p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should
370 include session transcripts with -v -v of both the working and
371 failing versions. Very often, the source of the problem can
372 instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
375 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
376 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
377 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
378 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
381 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
384 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
387 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
388 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
390 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed very quickly,
391 often within 48 hours. Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If
392 the solution isn't obvious when I first look, it may evade me for a
393 long time (or to put it another way, fetchmail is well enough
394 tested that the easy bugs have long since been found). So if you
395 want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just sufficient but nearly
396 <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to reproduce it.</p>
399 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
400 Will you add it?</a></h2>
402 <p>Probably not. Most of the feature suggestions I get are for ways
403 to set various kinds of administrative policy or add more spam
404 filtering (the most common one, which I used to get about four
405 million times a week and got <em>really</em> tired of, is for
406 tin-like kill files).</p>
408 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
409 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
410 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
411 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
412 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
414 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
415 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
416 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
417 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
419 <p>I'm not going to do these; fetchmail's job is transport, not
420 policy, and I refuse to change it from doing one thing well to
421 attempting many things badly. One of my objectives is to keep
422 fetchmail simple so it stays reliable.</p>
424 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
425 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
426 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
427 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
428 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
429 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
431 <p>Fetchmail is a mature project, no longer in constant active
432 development. It is no longer my top project, and I am going to be
433 quite reluctant to add features that might either jeopardize its
434 stability or involve me in large amounts of coding.</p>
436 <p>All that said, if you have a feature idea that really is about a
437 transport problem that can't be handled anywhere but fetchmail, lay
438 it on me. I'm very accommodating about good ideas.</p>
441 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like
442 Outlook Express.</a></h2>
444 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
445 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
446 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
447 <code>keep</code> option as a sort of poor man's newsgroup
448 facility. Microsoft's Outlook Express supports this.</p>
450 <p>This feature won't be added either. Repeat after me: fetchmail's
451 job is transport, not policy. If you want this, write a Perl or
452 Python script, to be run from a cron job, that deletes old messages
453 off your maildrop. Send it to me and I'll put it in the contrib
457 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
460 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list (fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de)
461 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
462 fetchmail. It's a Mailman list, see <a
463 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>.</p>
464 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
465 (fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de) for people who want to discuss
466 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
467 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
468 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.
469 There is also an announcements-only list,
470 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de, which you can sign up for at <a
471 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
474 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
475 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
477 <p>The fetchmail development was also a sociological experiment, an
478 extended test to see if my theory about the critical features of
479 the Linux development model is correct.</p>
481 <p>The experiment was a success. I wrote a paper about it titled <a
482 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
483 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
484 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
485 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
486 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
487 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape tell me it helped
489 href="http://www.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
490 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
492 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
493 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
496 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
499 <p>The short answer: IMAP 2000 running over Unix.</p>
501 <p>Here's a longer answer:</p>
503 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
504 that conforms to the relevant RFCs (and even some outright broken
505 ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
506 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works
507 equally well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers
508 without LAST, limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways
509 described on the manual page.</p>
511 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
512 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
513 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
514 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by running
515 fetchmail in AUTO mode, or by using the 'Probe for supported
516 protocols' function in the fetchmailconf utility).</p>
518 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
519 IMAP4rev1 server; it has the best facilities for tracking message
520 'seen' states. It also recovers from interrupted connections more
521 gracefully than POP3, and enables some significant performance
522 optimizations. The new <a
523 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/imap/imap.tar.Z">IMAP 2000</a>
524 is particularly nice, as it supports CRAM-MD5 so you don't have to
525 ship your mail password over the net en clair (fetchmail
526 autodetects this capability). Older versions had support for GSSAPI
527 giving a similar effect.</p>
529 <p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just
530 plain broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle
531 the sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even
532 Microsoft itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail
533 service runs over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John
534 Kirch's excellent <a href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white
535 paper</a> on Unix vs. NT performance.</p>
537 <p>Source for a high-quality supported implementation of POP is
538 available from the <a
539 href="ftp://ftp.qualcomm.com/eudora/servers/unix/popper/">Eudora
540 FTP site</a>. Don't use 2.5, which has a rather restrictive
541 license. The 2.5.2 version appears to restore the open-source
542 license of previous versions.</p>
545 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
546 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
548 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
549 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
550 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
551 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
552 popular Unix mail agents -- <a
553 href="http://www.myxa.com/old/elm.html">elm</a>, <a
554 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
555 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
556 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> -- will work fine with
559 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
560 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. My own personal
561 mail setup is sendmail plus fetchmail plus mutt. Mutt's interface
562 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
563 elm, but its excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it in a class
564 by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though; most
565 of the mutt developers will cheerfully admit that fetchmail's is
569 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
572 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
573 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
576 <p>Most people use fetchmail over phone wires (whether plain old
577 copper or DSL), which are hard to tap. Anybody with the skill and
578 resources to do this could get into your server mailbox with much less
579 effort by subverting the server host. So if your provider setup is
580 phone-company wire going straight into a service box, you probably
581 don't need to worry.</p>
583 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
584 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
585 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
586 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
587 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
588 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
590 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
591 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
592 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
593 to use end-to-end encryption on your whole mail stream so none of
594 it can be read. One of the advantages of fetchmail over
595 conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able to arrange
596 this by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
598 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
599 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
600 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
601 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
602 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
603 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
605 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
606 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
607 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
608 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
611 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
612 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
613 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
614 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
617 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, you'll have CRAM-MD5
618 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
621 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
622 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
623 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
624 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
625 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
626 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
627 You can register a secret on the host (using
628 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like it). Specify the
629 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
630 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
631 back the the server for verification.</p>
633 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
634 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
635 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
638 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
639 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
640 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
641 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
642 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
643 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
646 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
647 use their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
648 href="#I1">I1</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
649 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
651 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
652 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
653 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
654 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
655 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
656 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
657 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
658 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
660 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
661 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
662 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
664 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
665 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
666 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
667 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
669 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
670 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
673 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
674 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
676 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
677 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT
678 TO address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
679 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
680 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
681 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
683 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
684 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
685 client machine had when it started up.</p>
687 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
688 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
689 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
690 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
691 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
692 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
694 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
695 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
696 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
697 or you can use the IP address itself).</p>
699 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
700 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
701 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
702 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
703 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
705 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
706 option when initially developing your poll configuration -- it's
707 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
708 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
709 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
712 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
713 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
714 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
715 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
716 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
717 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
718 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
721 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
722 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
723 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
724 not yet widely deployed, as of early 2001.</p>
726 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
727 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
728 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname your giving
729 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
730 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
731 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
738 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
741 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
744 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
745 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
746 mailhost.) See the <a
747 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
751 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
752 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
754 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
755 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
756 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
757 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
760 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
761 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
764 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
765 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
767 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
768 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
770 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
771 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
772 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
773 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
774 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
776 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
777 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
778 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
779 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
780 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
783 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
784 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
786 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
788 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
789 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
790 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
791 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
795 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
796 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
798 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
799 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
800 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
801 different problem.</p>
804 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
805 heavy loads?</a></h2>
807 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
808 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
809 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
810 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory.</p>
812 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
813 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
814 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
815 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
816 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
818 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
819 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
820 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
821 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
822 but not necessarily latency).</p>
825 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1">B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
828 <p>The vendor-supplied make on FreeBSD systems can only be used
829 within FreeBSD's "scope", e.g. the ports collection. Type "gmake"
830 to run GNU make and better things will happen.</p>
833 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
834 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
836 <p>In the immortal words of Alan Cox the last time this came up:
837 "Take the Solaris lex and stick it up the backside of a passing
838 Sun salesman, then install <a
839 href="ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/non-gnu/flex/">flex</a> and use that.
840 All will be happier."</p>
842 <p>I couldn't have put it better myself, and ain't going to try
845 <p>(The same problem has been reported under HP-UX v10.20 and
849 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
850 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
852 <p>If you get errors resembling these</p>
855 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
856 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
857 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
858 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
859 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
862 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
863 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
865 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
869 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
870 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
871 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
872 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
873 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
874 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
875 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
876 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
879 <p>reconfigure with <tt>configure --with-included-gettext</tt>.
880 This is due to some brain-damage in the GNU internationalization
884 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
887 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
889 <p>GNU gettext is an overengineered, fragile pile of crap. I have
890 teetered on the brink of removing support for it entirely several
894 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
895 longer work?</a></h2>
897 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
899 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
900 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
902 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
904 <p>The 'via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
905 gone. Use the %h feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
907 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
909 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
910 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
911 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
913 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
915 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
916 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
917 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
918 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
919 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
921 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
922 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
923 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
924 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
925 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
927 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
928 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
929 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
931 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
933 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
934 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
936 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
938 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
939 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
940 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
941 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
942 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
945 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
947 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
948 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
949 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
950 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
951 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
952 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
954 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
955 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
956 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
959 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
960 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
961 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
962 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
964 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
965 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
966 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
967 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
968 contact the maintainer.</p>
970 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
972 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
973 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
974 parser will utter a warning.</p>
976 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
978 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
979 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
980 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
981 attached to a server entry.</p>
983 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
984 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
985 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
988 poll openmail protocol pop3
989 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
992 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
993 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
996 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
997 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
999 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
1001 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
1002 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
1004 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
1005 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
1006 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
1008 <p>If you had something like</p>
1011 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
1014 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
1015 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
1016 'defaults' declaration.</p>
1018 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
1019 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1022 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1023 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1025 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1028 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1029 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1030 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1033 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1034 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1037 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1038 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1040 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1041 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1042 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1043 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1045 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1046 around your token.</p>
1049 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1050 don't understand.</a></h2>
1052 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1053 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1054 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1055 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1057 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1058 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1059 feature to work.</p>
1062 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1063 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1065 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1067 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1068 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1071 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1074 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1075 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1076 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1077 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1081 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1085 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1086 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1088 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1089 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1090 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1095 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1096 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1097 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1098 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1100 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1101 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1104 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1105 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1108 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1109 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1110 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1111 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1114 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1115 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1116 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1117 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1120 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1121 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1123 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1124 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1125 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1126 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1127 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1128 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1130 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1131 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1132 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1133 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1134 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1135 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1137 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1138 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1141 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1142 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1144 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1145 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1146 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1147 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1150 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1151 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1152 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1153 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1154 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1155 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1158 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1159 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1160 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1161 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1162 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1163 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1164 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1165 one secure link.</p>
1167 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1170 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1173 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1176 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1177 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1178 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1179 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1180 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1183 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1186 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1187 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1188 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1190 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1191 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1192 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1193 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1196 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1197 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1198 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1199 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1200 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1203 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1204 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1205 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1206 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1209 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1212 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1213 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1216 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1220 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1221 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1223 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1224 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1225 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1227 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1228 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1229 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1230 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1232 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1233 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1236 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1237 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1241 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1242 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1243 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1244 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1245 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti-spam.html">sendmail
1246 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1248 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1251 makemap hash deny <deny
1254 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1256 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1257 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1258 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1259 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1260 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1262 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1263 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1264 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1268 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1269 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1271 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1272 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1273 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1274 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1277 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1278 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1281 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1282 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1283 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1284 every 30 minutes.</p>
1287 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1288 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1290 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1291 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1292 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1293 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1294 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1296 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1297 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1301 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1304 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1305 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1306 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1309 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1312 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1313 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1314 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1315 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1317 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1318 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1319 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1321 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1322 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1323 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1325 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1326 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1327 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1328 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1330 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1331 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1332 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1333 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1334 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1335 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1336 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1337 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1339 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1340 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1344 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1347 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1348 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1349 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1350 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1351 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1352 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1353 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1354 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1355 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1356 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1360 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1362 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1363 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1364 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1365 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1368 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1369 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1370 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1371 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1372 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1373 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1376 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1377 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1378 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1379 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1380 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1381 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1383 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1384 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1385 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1388 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1389 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1390 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1391 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1392 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1393 at start of a text line.</p>
1396 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1399 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1400 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1403 <p>(This information is thanks to Robert de Bath
1404 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1406 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package (see <a
1407 href="http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html">http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html</a>)
1408 then, providing the local hosts are also using qmail, it is
1409 possible to set up one fetchmail link to be reliably collect the
1410 mail for an entire domain.</p>
1412 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1413 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1414 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1415 on this line. The major reason for this is to prevent mail
1418 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site the
1419 ISP-mailhost will have normally put that site in its 'virtualhosts'
1420 control file so it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this
1421 site. This results in mail sent to
1422 'username@userhost.userdom.dom.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1426 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.dom.com
1429 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1432 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.dom.com
1435 <p>The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1436 but a string matching the user host name is likely.</p>
1438 <p>To use this line you must:</p>
1441 <li>Ensure the option 'envelope Delivered-To:' is in the fetchmail
1444 <li>Ensure you have a localdomains containing 'userdom.dom.com' or
1445 'userhost.dom.com' respectively.</li>
1448 <p>So far this reliably delivers messages to the correct machine of
1449 the local network, to deliver to the correct user the
1450 'mbox-userstr-' prefix must be stripped off of the user name. This
1451 can be done by setting up an alias within the qmail MTA on each
1452 local machine. Simply create a dot-qmail file called
1453 '.qmail-mbox-userstr-default' in the alias directory (normally
1454 /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:</p>
1457 | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"
1460 <p>Note this <em>does</em> require a modern /bin/sh.</p>
1462 <p>Peter Wilson adds:</p>
1464 <p>"My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means
1465 that I need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is
1466 due to qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is
1467 handled by the file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or
1468 ~user/.qmail-default)."</p>
1470 <p>Luca Olivetti adds:</p>
1472 <p>If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up
1473 the alias mechanism described above, you can use the option
1474 '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' in your fetchmail config
1475 file to strip the prefix from the local user name.</p>
1478 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1481 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1483 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1484 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1485 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1486 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1487 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1489 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1490 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1491 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1494 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1497 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1499 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1500 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1501 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1502 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1503 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1504 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1506 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1507 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1508 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1509 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1512 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1513 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1514 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1518 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1521 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1522 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1523 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1524 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1527 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1530 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1531 work fine out of the box.</p>
1533 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1534 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1535 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1536 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1537 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1540 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1541 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1542 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1543 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1544 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1545 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1546 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1548 <p>You may also need to say
1549 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1550 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1551 recipient addresses.</p>
1554 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1557 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1558 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1560 href="http://www.aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1561 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1565 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1568 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1569 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1570 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1573 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1576 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1577 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1578 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1581 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1583 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1585 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1588 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1591 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3
1592 servers, and is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some
1593 problems which fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a
1594 href="#G8">IMAP</a> instead if at all possible. If you must talk to
1595 qpopper, here are some problems to be aware of:</p>
1597 <h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
1600 href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a> reports
1601 that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper 2.5.3
1602 under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to 2.0.35.
1603 When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3, fetchmail
1604 will hang with a socket error.</p>
1606 <p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of
1607 some problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission
1608 pattern is tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also
1609 displays the hang but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The
1610 problem can also be banished by <a
1611 href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to
1612 qpopper 3.0b1</a>.</p>
1614 <h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
1616 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
1617 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a
1618 href="#X5">X5</a> for details. The solution is to upgrade your
1622 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1625 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1626 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1627 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1628 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1629 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1630 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1632 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1633 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1634 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1636 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1637 with M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with
1638 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1639 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1640 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1643 <p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1644 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1645 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1646 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1649 <p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
1650 features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1651 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1652 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1653 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1654 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1655 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1657 <p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
1658 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1661 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1662 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1665 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1666 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1669 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1671 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1673 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1675 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1678 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1680 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1682 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1684 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1685 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1687 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1689 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1690 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1693 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1695 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1698 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1701 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1702 System\Pop3 Performance
1706 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1708 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1709 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1711 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1712 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1713 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1715 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1717 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1721 <p>The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me
1722 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1725 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1726 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1727 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1729 <p>This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to
1730 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1731 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1732 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1733 name from your username.</p>
1735 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1736 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1737 username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame,
1738 almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in
1741 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1744 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1745 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1747 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1748 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1751 <p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
1752 ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
1753 Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris
1757 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1760 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1761 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1762 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1763 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1764 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1765 Resent- headers.</p>
1767 <p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to
1768 get a POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead.
1769 OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1772 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1773 command fails, returning only one line regrardless of its argument,
1774 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1777 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1779 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named
1780 GroupFoolish; it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably
1781 broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required content
1782 length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1784 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend
1785 voting with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you
1786 stick with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will
1787 probably pay for it with other problems.</p>
1790 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1791 InterChange?</a></h2>
1793 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1794 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server;
1795 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1796 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1798 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing
1799 me that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this
1800 problem. I don't have any reports one way or the other yet.</p>
1803 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1805 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1806 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1807 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1809 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1810 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1811 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1812 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1813 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1816 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1818 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1819 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1820 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1824 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1826 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1827 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1828 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1829 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1830 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1831 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1834 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1835 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1836 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1837 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1838 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1839 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1840 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1841 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1842 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1844 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1845 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1847 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1848 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1851 # This version will use RPA
1852 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1853 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1854 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1856 # This version will not use RPA
1857 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1858 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1859 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1863 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1864 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1866 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1868 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1869 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1870 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1871 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1873 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1874 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1875 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1878 set postmaster "philh"
1879 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1880 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1883 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1885 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1886 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1887 maildrop, like this:</p>
1890 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1891 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1894 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1895 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1896 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1897 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1898 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1899 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1900 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1903 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1904 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1908 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1909 30 days old; see their <a
1910 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/products/mail/sdps-tech.shtml">POP3
1911 page</a> for details.</p>
1913 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1915 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1916 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1917 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1918 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1920 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1921 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1922 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1923 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1926 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1927 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1928 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1931 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1932 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1933 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1936 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1939 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1940 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1941 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1942 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1943 certainly a server bug.</p>
1945 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1946 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1947 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1948 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1949 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1950 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1952 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1953 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1954 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1956 <p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's
1957 servers. They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding
1958 another provider.)</p>
1961 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1962 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1964 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1965 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1966 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1967 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1968 any of the following headers.</p>
1970 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "-mda" switch:</p>
1973 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1976 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1978 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1979 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1980 already been read.</p>
1982 <p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
1983 Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.</p>
1986 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1988 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1989 webmail with the help of the <a
1990 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1991 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1992 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1993 configuration should look like this:</p>
1996 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1997 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1998 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
2002 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
2003 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
2006 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
2008 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
2009 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
2010 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
2012 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
2013 as the only appropriate response.</p>
2015 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
2016 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
2017 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
2021 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
2023 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
2024 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
2025 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
2026 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
2030 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?</a></h2>
2032 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a comcast.net server...<em>but</em>
2033 the Maillennium POP3 server comcat uses seems to have an 80K limit on
2034 the length of downloaded messages if you use POP3 TOP to retrieve.
2035 Anything larger is silently truncated. Don't mistake this for a
2036 fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.)</p>
2038 <p>Workaround: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
2041 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
2043 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports
2044 linking with socks library. If you specify the value of this option
2045 as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2046 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2047 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2049 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may
2050 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2053 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2056 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2057 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2060 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2062 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp</a></p>
2064 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2069 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2070 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2074 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2077 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2081 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2084 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2085 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2086 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2087 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2088 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2089 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2090 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2091 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2093 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2094 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2095 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2096 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2099 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2100 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2102 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2103 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos
2104 V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2105 IMAP server. UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
2106 href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
2107 is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for
2108 other reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and
2109 it has to have GSS support compiled in.</p>
2111 <p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by
2112 default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
2113 distribution (available via FTP at <a
2114 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
2115 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2116 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2117 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2118 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2119 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2121 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2122 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2123 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2124 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2125 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2126 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2127 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2129 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2130 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2131 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2132 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2133 Kerberos principal.</p>
2135 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2136 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2139 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2142 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2143 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed.
2144 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2145 installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl) ths will
2146 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2147 you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after an
2150 <p>Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek
2151 under OpenSSL versions 0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally
2152 tripped over, causing hangs. It is recommended that you install
2155 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2156 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2157 SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2158 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2159 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2161 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2162 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2163 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2164 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2165 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2166 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2168 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2169 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2170 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2171 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2173 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2174 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work:</p>
2177 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2178 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2181 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2182 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2183 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2184 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2185 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2187 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2188 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2189 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2190 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2191 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2192 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2194 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2195 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2196 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2199 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2200 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2201 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2202 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2203 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2204 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2207 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2211 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2212 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2215 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2216 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2219 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2220 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2221 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2222 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2223 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2224 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2225 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2227 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2228 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2229 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2230 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2231 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2234 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2235 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2238 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2239 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2240 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2241 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2244 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2245 if the server advertises it?</a></h2>
2247 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2248 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2249 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2250 his certificates properly.</p>
2252 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2253 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2255 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2257 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2258 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2259 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2260 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2263 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2264 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2266 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2267 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2269 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2270 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2271 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2272 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2273 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2275 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2276 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2277 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2279 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2280 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2281 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2282 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2283 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2284 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2285 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2287 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2288 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2289 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2291 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2292 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2293 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2294 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2295 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2296 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2298 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2299 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2300 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2301 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2303 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2304 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2305 than one IP address.</p>
2307 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2308 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2309 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2315 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2316 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2317 Make sure it says something like</p>
2323 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2326 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2327 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2328 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2329 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2330 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2332 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2333 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2334 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2335 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2337 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2338 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2339 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2342 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2343 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2345 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2346 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2348 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2349 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2350 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2351 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2353 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2354 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2355 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2359 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2360 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2362 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2363 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2364 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2365 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2367 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2369 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2370 href="ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/~ftp/pub/gnu">flex</a> from the Free
2371 Software Foundation. An FSF <a
2372 href="http://www.gnu.ai.mit.edu/order/ftp.html">mirror site</a>
2373 will help you get it faster.</p>
2376 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2377 operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
2379 <p>We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and
2380 gcc-2.7.2. It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier
2383 <p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library
2386 <p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
2387 version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
2388 calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
2389 Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
2390 calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself,
2391 not the fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an
2392 fclose called directly by fetchmail, either).</p>
2395 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2396 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2399 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2400 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2401 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2402 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2403 reportt no problem.</p>
2405 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2406 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2407 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2408 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2410 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2411 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2414 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2417 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2418 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2419 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2420 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2421 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2422 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2425 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2428 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2429 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2430 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2431 are option values that work:</p>
2438 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2439 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2440 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2441 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2442 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2443 corresponding IP address.</p>
2446 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2447 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2449 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2450 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2451 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2452 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2456 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2457 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2459 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2460 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2464 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2465 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2466 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2467 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2468 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2470 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2471 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2472 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2473 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2476 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2478 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2479 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2484 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2487 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2488 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2489 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2490 packet-fragmentation problem, that's where you'll see it.</p>
2493 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2496 <p>This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your
2497 MDA is croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove
2498 the <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP
2501 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
2502 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
2503 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
2504 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
2505 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
2506 at start of a text line.</p>
2509 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2510 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2512 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2513 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2516 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2517 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2518 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2519 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2520 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2521 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2522 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2523 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2524 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table>
2525 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2526 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2527 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2528 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2529 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2532 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2535 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2536 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2537 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2540 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2543 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2544 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2547 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2550 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2551 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2552 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2553 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2555 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2558 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2560 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2562 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2570 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2573 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2577 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2580 <p>For more details consult the file
2581 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2584 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2587 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2588 but hangs returning:</p>
2591 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2592 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2593 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2594 .......fetchmail: flushed
2595 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2596 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2599 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2602 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2606 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2607 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2609 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2610 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2612 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2613 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2614 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2616 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2617 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2619 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2623 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2626 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2629 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2630 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2632 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2633 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2634 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2635 also truncates long lines at column 1024)</p>
2637 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2638 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it
2639 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2640 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2642 <p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to
2643 restore the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If
2644 you have one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a
2645 small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP
2646 connects to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes
2647 to the queue more often.</p>
2649 <p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better
2650 behaved. If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all
2651 DELE commands as though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical
2652 violation of the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky
2653 phone lines). Then it will re-queue any message that was being
2654 downloaded at hangup time. Still, qpopper may require a noticeable
2655 amount of time to do deletions and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail
2656 waits a bit before retrying in order to avoid a 'lock busy'
2660 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2661 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2663 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2664 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2665 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2666 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2667 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2669 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2670 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2671 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2672 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2673 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2674 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2675 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2677 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2680 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a>
2684 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2685 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2687 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2688 recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
2689 matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
2690 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2691 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2692 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2694 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration
2695 problem either on the server or your client machine.</p>
2697 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2698 necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
2699 mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2700 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be
2701 uncollected if it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you
2702 don't have listed).</p>
2704 <p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can
2705 hurt you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
2706 intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the
2709 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2710 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2713 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2714 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2716 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2717 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2718 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2719 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2721 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2722 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2723 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2724 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2725 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2726 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2728 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2729 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2730 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2731 MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
2732 is with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2734 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2737 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2738 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2740 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2741 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2742 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2743 multidrop routing.</p>
2745 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2747 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2748 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2749 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2750 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2752 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2753 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2754 that is useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set
2755 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2756 bamboozled by this.</p>
2758 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2759 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2763 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2764 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2766 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2767 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2768 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2769 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2771 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2772 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2775 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2776 having DNS problems.</a></h2>
2778 <p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
2779 href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the
2780 reference to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently
2781 in some older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version
2784 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2785 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2786 won't be, and this problem should go away.</p>
2789 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2790 message is processed.</a></h2>
2792 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2793 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2794 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2797 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2798 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2799 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2801 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2802 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2803 address is valid.</p>
2806 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2807 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2809 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2810 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2811 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2812 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2813 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2815 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2816 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2819 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2821 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2822 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2823 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2826 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2829 #############################################
2830 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2831 #############################################
2833 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2835 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2836 ---------------------------
2838 -------------------------
2839 # handle virtual users
2841 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2842 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2843 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2844 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2845 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2848 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2849 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2850 work. Michael says:</p>
2852 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2853 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2854 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2858 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2859 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2861 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2862 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2863 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2866 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2868 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2869 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2870 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2871 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2873 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2874 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2875 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2876 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2877 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2879 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2881 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2884 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2885 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2886 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2889 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2890 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2891 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2892 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2893 as an alias of your server.</p>
2896 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2899 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2900 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2901 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2902 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2903 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2905 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2906 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2907 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2908 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2909 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2910 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2913 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2914 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2915 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2916 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2920 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2921 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2923 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2924 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2925 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2926 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2927 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2929 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2930 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2931 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2932 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2933 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as procmail) and
2934 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2937 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2940 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2941 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2942 the server and choked on by an old version of
2943 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2945 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2946 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2947 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2948 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2951 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of
2952 line are being split.</a></h2>
2954 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2955 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2956 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2959 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2960 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2961 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2962 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2964 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2965 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2966 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2969 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2970 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2971 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2972 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2973 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2974 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2975 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2976 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2978 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2979 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2982 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2985 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2986 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2987 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2988 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2991 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2992 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2993 different way</a></h2>
2995 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2996 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2997 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2998 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
3001 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
3002 order they pass your mail:</p>
3005 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
3007 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
3009 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
3011 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
3013 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
3014 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
3017 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
3018 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
3019 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
3020 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
3021 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
3023 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
3024 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
3025 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
3028 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
3031 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
3032 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
3033 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
3034 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
3035 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
3036 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
3038 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
3039 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
3040 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
3041 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
3042 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
3044 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
3045 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
3046 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
3047 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
3048 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
3049 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
3050 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
3052 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
3053 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
3054 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
3055 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
3056 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
3057 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
3058 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
3059 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
3060 actual password.</p>
3062 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
3063 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
3064 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
3065 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
3066 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
3067 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
3068 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
3069 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
3070 operating system.</p>
3072 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
3073 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
3074 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
3075 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
3076 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
3077 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
3080 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3081 fetching too much!</a></h2>
3083 <p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before
3084 4.4.8. Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than
3085 RETR, in order to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen
3086 is helpful for later recovery if you lose your connection in the
3087 middle of a retrieval).</p>
3089 <p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
3090 interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP
3091 bounds check was fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP
3092 argument. Decrementing the TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.</p>
3094 <p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.</p>
3096 <p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
3097 this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.</p>
3100 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3101 or mangled.</a></h2>
3103 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3104 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3105 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3106 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3107 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3109 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3110 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3111 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3112 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3113 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3114 only effective solution.</p>
3116 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3117 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3118 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3121 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3122 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3123 you're having this problem. The <a
3124 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3127 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3128 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3131 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3132 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3133 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3134 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3137 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3138 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3139 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3140 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3141 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3142 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3143 generates different Boundary tags for each part, .e.g. one tag is
3144 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3145 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3146 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3147 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3149 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3150 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3151 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3152 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3153 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3154 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3156 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3157 attachments is the <a
3158 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3160 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3161 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3162 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3163 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3164 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3167 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3168 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3169 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3170 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3173 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3178 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3179 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3180 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3181 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3183 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3186 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3187 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3191 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3192 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3193 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3194 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3195 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3196 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3197 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3198 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3199 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3200 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3201 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3202 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3203 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3205 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3208 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3210 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3212 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3214 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3215 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3217 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3219 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3222 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3223 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3224 internet interoperability.</p>
3226 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3227 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3228 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3229 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3230 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3231 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3232 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3233 mailtool's format.</p>
3236 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3239 <p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know
3240 anything about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any
3241 differently from plain message data.</p>
3243 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3244 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3245 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3246 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3247 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3248 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3249 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3250 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3252 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3253 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3254 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3255 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3256 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3257 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3260 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3263 <p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
3264 Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3265 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%.
3266 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3267 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3270 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3271 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3274 <p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3275 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3276 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</p>
3278 <p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3279 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3280 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3281 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3282 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3283 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3286 <p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3287 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3288 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3289 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3297 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p>
3299 <p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3300 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.</p>
3302 <p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3303 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3304 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</p>
3306 <p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
3307 href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.</p>
3310 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3311 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3313 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3314 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3315 the log, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To
3316 get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3317 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it
3318 already exists).</p>
3321 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message
3322 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3324 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3325 which Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of
3326 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3327 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3333 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3339 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3340 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3341 /etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.</p>
3343 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3356 to solve the problem system-wide.
3359 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3360 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3362 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3363 your rc file and restart, reading it.</p>
3366 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3367 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3369 <p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an
3370 IMAP with a long expunge interval.</p>
3372 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3373 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3374 fix this, because doing it right takes cooperation from the server.
3375 There are two possible remedies:</p>
3377 <p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
3378 the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
3379 doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as
3380 well as on processing a QUIT command.</p>
3382 <p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
3383 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
3384 command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages
3385 immediately after they are downloaded.</p>
3387 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3388 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3389 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3390 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3393 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3394 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3396 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3397 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3400 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3401 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3402 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3403 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3404 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3406 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3407 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3408 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3410 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3411 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3412 the log will look right.</p>
3415 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3416 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3418 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3419 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3421 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3422 to fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
3423 <code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
3424 fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>,
3425 and that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably
3426 also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.</p>
3428 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by
3429 reconfiguring with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3431 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3432 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3433 Switching to a faster MTA like qmail or exim might help.</p>
3436 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3437 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3439 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3442 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3443 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3444 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3446 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3447 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3448 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3449 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3450 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3453 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3456 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3457 option working?</a></h2>
3459 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3460 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3461 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3462 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3463 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3464 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3465 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3466 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3469 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3470 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3472 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3473 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3474 turn <cite>keep</cite> off.</p>
3476 <p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL
3477 feature that can lead to all your old messages being seen again
3478 after a line drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL
3479 code breaks worse every time I touch it. The problem is
3480 fundamental; maintaining and garbage-collecting the right kind of
3481 client-side state is just hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and
3482 removed LAST should be hung up by his thumbs and whipped with
3483 scorpions. The right answers are either (a) live with the
3484 occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4, or (c) fix the code
3485 yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose (c), I don't want
3486 to hear about it.</p>
3488 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3489 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3490 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3491 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3492 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3493 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3494 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3496 <p>James Stevens <James.Stevens at kyzo.com> writes:</p>
3498 <p><em>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from
3499 an NT POP3 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting
3500 each e-mail one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very
3501 unreliable and would often just drop out in the middle of a
3504 <p><em>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated
3505 normally (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll
3506 back all the deletes !!!</em></p>
3508 <p><em>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just
3509 end up continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or,
3510 if the queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
3511 connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back
3512 any deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the
3513 first few e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became
3514 fuller and fuller the chances of getting a connection long enough
3515 to collect theentire mailbox became smaller and smaller.</em></p>
3517 <p><em>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5
3518 or 10) e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3
3519 connection is terminated correctly.</em></p>
3521 <p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
3522 to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
3523 switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.</p>
3526 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my
3527 messages the same?</a></h2>
3529 <p>This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking
3530 the received date from the last Received header.</p>
3533 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3534 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3536 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.</p>
3538 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3539 get the message only once per run.</p>
3541 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3542 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3545 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3547 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3549 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3550 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3551 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3552 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3554 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3556 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3557 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3558 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3559 your local server is.</p>
3561 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>.</p>
3563 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3566 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3569 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3571 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3572 does something like "date >> $HOME/Procmail/fetchmail.log".</p>
3575 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3578 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> to delete oversized mails along with
3579 the <code>--limit</code> option. If you are already having
3580 <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete oversized mails,
3581 <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to avoid losing mails
3582 unintentionally.</p>
3584 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3585 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3586 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3587 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3588 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3589 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3590 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3593 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3596 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3597 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3598 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3599 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3600 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3601 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3606 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3607 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3608 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3609 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3610 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3611 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3614 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3615 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3616 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3617 with the data reset to initial values.
3621 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3622 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3623 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3624 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3628 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
3630 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
3632 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
3637 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3638 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3639 Matthias Andree</address>