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17 <title>The Fetchmail FAQ</title>
18 <meta name="description"
19 content="Frequently asked questions about fetchmail."/>
20 <meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, POP, POP2, POP3, IMAP, remote mail"/>
23 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
25 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
27 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
32 <h1 id="FAQ">Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</h1>
34 <p><strong>Support? Bug reports?</strong> Please read <a
35 href="#G3">G3</a> for what information is required to get your problem
36 solved as quickly as possible.</p>
38 <p>Note that this FAQ is occasionally updated from the Git repository
39 and speaks in the past tense ("since") about a fetchmail release that is
40 not yet available. Please try a release candidate for that version in
41 case you need the new option.</p>
43 <p>If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to
44 this FAQ list, file it to one of the trackers at <a
45 href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">our BerliOS
46 project site</a> or post to one of the fetchmail mailing lists (see
49 <h1 id="Contents">Contents</h1>
51 <a href="#Contentdetail">Detailed Contents</a><br/>
52 <a href="#C_G">G. General problems</a><br/>
53 <a href="#C_B">B. Build-time problems</a><br/>
54 <a href="#C_F">F. Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</a><br/>
55 <a href="#C_C">C. Configuration questions</a><br/>
56 <a href="#C_T">T. How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</a><br/>
57 <a href="#C_S">S. How to make fetchmail work with various servers</a><br/>
58 <a href="#C_I">I. How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</a><br/>
59 <a href="#C_K">K. How to set up well-known security and authentication</a><br/>
60 <a href="#C_R">R. Runtime fatal errors</a><br/>
61 <a href="#C_H">H. Hangs and lockups</a><br/>
62 <a href="#C_D">D. Disappearing mail</a><br/>
63 <a href="#C_M">M. Multidrop-mode problems</a><br/>
64 <a href="#C_X">X. Mangled mail</a><br/>
65 <a href="#C_O">O. Other problems</a><br/>
67 <h1 id="Contentdetail">Detailed Contents</h1>
69 <h2 id="C_G">General problems</h2>
71 <a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br/>
72 <a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br/>
73 <a href="#G3">G3. Something doesn't work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
74 <a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br/>
75 <a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after some days.</a><br/>
76 <a href="#G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br/>
77 <a href="#G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br/>
78 <a href="#G8">G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
79 <a href="#G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
80 <a href="#G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?</a><br/>
81 <a href="#G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?</a><br/>
82 <a href="#G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?</a><br/>
83 <a href="#G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed to <em>send</em> mail?</a><br/>
84 <a href="#G14">G14. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?</a><br/>
85 <a href="#G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?</a><br/>
86 <a href="#G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?</a><br/>
89 <h2 id="C_B">Build-time problems</h2>
91 <a href="#B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.</strike></a><br/>
92 <a href="#B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.</a><br/>
93 <a href="#B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.</a><br/>
94 <a href="#B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.</a><br/>
96 <h2 id="C_F">Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h2>
98 <a href="#F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?</a><br/>
99 <a href="#F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.</a><br/>
100 <a href="#F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a><br/>
101 <a href="#F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I don't understand.</a><br/>
103 <h2 id="C_C">Configuration questions</h2>
105 <a href="#C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root
106 on my own machine?</a><br/>
107 <a href="#C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get
108 killed when I log out?</a><br/>
109 <a href="#C3">C3. How do I know what interface and address to use
110 with --interface?</a><br/>
111 <a href="#C4">C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam
113 <a href="#C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less
114 often than others?</a><br/>
115 <a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not
116 from an init script.</a><br/>
117 <a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
119 <a href="#C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
122 <h2 id="C_T">How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h2>
124 <a href="#T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?</a><br/>
125 <a href="#T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?</a><br/>
126 <a href="#T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?</a><br/>
127 <a href="#T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?</a><br/>
128 <a href="#T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?</a><br/>
129 <a href="#T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?</a><br/>
130 <a href="#T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?</a><br/>
131 <a href="#T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a><br/>
133 <h2 id="C_S">How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h2>
135 <a href="#S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</strike></a><br/>
136 <a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br/>
137 <a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br/>
138 <a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br/>
139 <a href="#S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?</a><br/>
140 <a href="#S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a><br/>
141 <a href="#S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a><br/>
143 <h2 id="C_I">How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h2>
145 <a href="#I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?</a><br/>
146 <a href="#I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?</a><br/>
147 <a href="#I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?</a><br/>
148 <a href="#I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?</a><br/>
149 <a href="#I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a><br/>
150 <a href="#I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a><br/>
151 <a href="#I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br/>
152 <a href="#I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or other
153 Maillennium servers?</a><br/>
154 <a href="#I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a><br/>
156 <h2 id="C_K">How to set up well-known security and authentication
159 <a href="#K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a><br/>
160 <a href="#K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?</a><br/>
161 <a href="#K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?</a><br/>
162 <a href="#K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?</a><br/>
163 <a href="#K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?</a><br/>
164 <a href="#K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to try TLS if the server
165 advertises it? Why does fetchmail use SSL even though not configured?</a><br/>
167 <h2 id="C_R">Runtime fatal errors</h2>
169 <a href="#R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows 'SMTP
170 connect failed' messages.</a><br/>
171 <a href="#R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't
173 <a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
175 <a href="#R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
176 normally otherwise.</strike></a><br/>
177 <a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
179 <a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
180 <a href="#R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after
181 an OS upgrade</a><br/>
182 <a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
183 messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
184 <a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
185 <a href="#R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</strike></a><br/>
186 <a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
187 <a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
189 <a href="#R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call" mean?</a>
191 <h2 id="C_H">Hangs and lockups</h2>
193 <a href="#H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.</a><br/>
194 <a href="#H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
196 <a href="#H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.</a><br/>
199 <h2 id="C_D">Disappearing mail</h2>
201 <a href="#D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm
202 not getting any mail.</a><br/>
203 <a href="#D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped
205 <a href="#D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my
206 fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a><br/>
209 <h2 id="C_M">Multidrop-mode problems</h2>
211 <a href="#M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop
212 mail is going to root anyway.</a><br/>
213 <a href="#M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local
214 domain properly.</a><br/>
215 <a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
216 and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
217 <a href="#M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
218 problems.</strike></a><br/>
219 <a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
221 <a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
223 <a href="#M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses
224 from my Received headers as it should.</a><br/>
225 <a href="#M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
229 <h2 id="C_X">Mangled mail</h2>
231 <a href="#X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers
232 of fetched mail.</a><br/>
233 <a href="#X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
235 <a href="#X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are
236 being split.</a><br/>
237 <a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
239 <a href="#X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
240 much!</strike></a><br/>
241 <a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
243 <a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
245 <a href="#X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
247 <a href="#X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
248 with Domino IMAP</a><br/>
249 <a href="#X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial messages</a><br/>
252 <h2 id="C_O">Other problems</h2>
254 <a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
255 doesn't exist.</a><br/>
256 <a href="#O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header
257 is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a><br/>
258 <a href="#O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll
260 <a href="#O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take
261 a line hit while downloading?</a><br/>
262 <a href="#O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name,
263 not the real From address?</a><br/>
264 <a href="#O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the
265 start of each poll cycle.</a><br/>
266 <a href="#O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted
268 <a href="#O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option
270 <a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
271 messages over and over?</a><br/>
272 <a href="#O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
273 same?</strike></a><br/>
274 <a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
275 immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
276 <a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
277 <a href="#O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a><br/>
278 <a href="#O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
280 <a href="#O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
282 <a href="#O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
283 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter
285 <a href="#O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
286 in MSG_PEEK."</a><br/>
289 <h1 id="G">General problems</h1>
290 <h2><a id="G1" name="G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I
293 <p>Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval
294 problem for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an
295 intermittent or dynamic-IP connection to a remote mailserver, SLIP or
296 PPP dialup, or leased line when SMTP isn't desired. Fetchmail can
297 collect mail using any variant of POP or IMAP and forwards to a the
298 local SMTP (via TCP socket) or LMTP (via TCP or Unix socket) listener or
299 into an MDA program, enabling all the normal
300 forwarding/filtering/aliasing mechanisms that would apply to local mail
301 or mail arriving via a full-time TCP/IP connection.</p>
303 <p>Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
304 industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
305 retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection
306 up to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain.
307 Fetchmail is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
308 feature-rich, and well documented.</p>
310 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">Open Source</a>
311 Software. The openness of the sources enables you to review and
312 customize the code, and contribute your changes.</p>
314 <p>A former fetchmail maintainer once claimed that Open Source software
315 were the strongest quality assurance, but the current maintainers do not
316 believe that open source alone is a criterion for quality – <a
317 href="fetchmail-SA-2005-01.txt">the remotely exploitable POP3
318 vulnerability (CVE-2005-2335)</a> lingered undiscovered in
319 fetchmail's code for years, which is a hint that open source code does
320 not audit itself.</p>
322 <p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
323 href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
326 <p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
327 fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
329 <h2><a id="G2" name="G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and
330 fetchmail sources?</a></h2>
332 <p>The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
333 sources at the fetchmail home page: <a
334 href="http://www.fetchmail.info/">http://www.fetchmail.info/</a>.
335 You can also usually find both in the <a
336 href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/system/mail/pop/!INDEX.short.html">
337 POP mail tools directory on iBiblio</a>.</p>
339 <p>A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail
340 distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
341 may not be completely current.</p>
343 <h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. Something does not work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a></h2>
345 <p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
346 fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
347 save us both time if you upgrade and test with <a href="#G2">the latest
348 version</a> <em>before</em> sending in a bug report.</p>
350 <p>Bugs will be fixed, provided you include enough diagnostic information
351 for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
352 href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
353 When sending bugs or asking for help, please <strong>do not make up
354 information except your password</strong> and please
355 <strong>report</strong> the following:</p>
358 <li>Your operating system.</li>
360 <li>Your compiler version, if you built from source; otherwise, the
361 name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
364 <li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
367 <li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
369 <li>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail -V</kbd> called with
370 whatever other command-line options you used.</li>
372 <li><strong>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail --nodetach -vvv
373 --nosyslog</kbd> with whatever other command-line options you use
375 <p>It is very important that the transcript include your
376 POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server
377 problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are
378 specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.</p>
382 <p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
383 any suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message,
384 please include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.</p>
386 <p>If your bug is something that used to work but stopped working
387 when you upgraded, then you can help pin the bug down by trying <a
388 href="http://download.berlios.de/fetchmail/">intermediate versions
389 of fetchmail</a> until you identify the revision that broke your
390 feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search on the
391 version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your last
392 good one and the current one. If it works, the failure was
393 introduced in the upper half of the sequence; if it doesn't, the
394 failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
395 the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
396 the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
397 introduced. <strong>Please</strong> include session transcripts (as
398 described in the last bullet point above) of <strong>both
399 the working and failing versions.</strong> Often, the source of the problem
400 can instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
403 <p>It may helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
404 necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
405 configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
406 the passwords first! Otherwise, fetchmail -V – as directed above
407 – will usually suffice.</p>
409 <p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
410 mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
411 in the headers) then read the FAQ items in section <a
412 href="#X1">X</a> before submitting a bug report. Pay special
413 attention to the item on <a href="#generic_mangling">diagnosing
414 mail mangling</a>. There are lots of ways for other programs in the
415 mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
416 may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
418 <p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
419 good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
420 but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
421 You will need to reconfigure with:</p>
424 CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure
427 <p>Then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
428 traced with a debugger such as gdb, dbx or idb.</p>
430 <p>Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce
431 the bug under the latest (current) version.</p>
433 <p>Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed quite quickly.
434 Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the solution isn't obvious
435 when I first look, it may evade me for a long time (or to put it another
436 way, fetchmail is well enough tested that the easy bugs have long since
437 been found). So if you want your bug fixed rapidly, it is not just
438 sufficient but <em>necessary</em> that you give me a way to
439 easily reproduce it.</p>
441 <h2><a id="G4" name="G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature.
442 Will you add it?</a></h2>
444 <p>If it's reasonable for fetchmail and cannot be solved with reasonable
445 effort outside of fetchmail, perhaps.</p>
447 <p>You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on
448 the server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf
449 domain exclusions. If you really want fetchmail to do it from the
450 client side, use a <code>preconnect</code> command to call
451 <a href='http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/'>mailfilter</a>.</p>
453 <p>You can do other policy things better with the
454 <code>mda</code> option and script wrappers around fetchmail. If
455 it's a prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a
456 wrapper script called from crontab would do the job.</p>
458 <p>fetchmail's first job is transport though, and it should do this
459 well. If a feature would cause fetchmail to deteriorate in other
460 respects, the feature will probably not be added.</p>
462 <p>For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested
463 features (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls
464 from the same instance of fetchmail) see <a
465 href="esrs-design-notes.html">ESR's design
466 notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
467 <a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
469 <h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after
472 <p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
473 content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
474 from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
475 <code>keep</code> option. Several messaging programs with graphical
476 user interface support this feature.</p>
478 <p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
479 spare time of developers permitting.</p>
481 <p>For the time being, the contrib/ directory contains some <em>unsupported</em>
482 tools that may help, namely mold-remover.py and delete-later.</p>
484 <h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
487 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list
488 <fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de>
489 for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
490 fetchmail. Please see <a href="#G3">G3 above for information you need to
491 report.</a> It's a Mailman list, see <a
492 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>
493 for info and subscription.</p>
494 <p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
495 <fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de> for people who want to discuss
496 fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
497 Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
498 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.</p>
499 <p>There is also an announcements-only list,
500 <fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de>, which you can sign up for at <a
501 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
503 <h2><a id="G7" name="G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a
504 fetchmail paper?</a></h2>
506 <p>Eric S. Raymond also considered fetchmail development a sociological
507 experiment, an extended test to see if my theory about the critical
508 features of the Linux development model is correct.</p>
510 <p>He considers the experiment a success. He wrote a paper about it titled <a
511 href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html">The
512 Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> which was first presented at Linux
513 Kongress '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also
514 given at Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first
515 Perl Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
516 presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape told ESR it helped
518 href="http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html">give
519 away the source for Netscape Communicator</a>.</p>
521 <p>If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the
522 paper on the Web with a search for that title.</p>
524 <h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
527 <p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
528 that conforms to the relevant standards/RFCs (and even some outright
529 broken ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
530 href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally
531 well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without UIDL,
532 limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
535 <p>Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come
536 with POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken
537 POP3 server mentioned in <a href="#D2">D2</a>). An increasing
538 minority also feature IMAP (you can detect IMAP support by using the
539 'Probe for supported protocols' function in the fetchmailconf
540 utility - unfortunately it does not detect SSL-wrapped variants).</p>
542 <p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
543 IMAP4rev1 or UIDL-capable POP3 server.</p>
545 <p>A decent POP3/IMAP server that has recently become popular is <a
546 href="http://dovecot.org/">Dovecot</a>.</p>
548 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
549 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
551 <h2><a id="G9" name="G9">G9. What is the best mail program to use
552 with fetchmail?</a></h2>
554 <p>Fetchmail will work with all popular <a href="#T1">mail
555 transport programs</a>. It also doesn't care which user agent you
556 use, and user agents are as a rule almost equally indifferent to
557 how mail is delivered into your system mailbox. So any of the
558 popular Unix mail agents – <a
559 href="http://www.instinct.org/elm/">elm</a>, <a
560 href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/">pine</a>, <a
561 href="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/mail/mh.html">mh</a>, or
562 <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a> – will work fine with
565 <p>All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet
566 plug for <a href="http://www.mutt.org">mutt</a>. Mutt's interface
567 is only a little different from that of its now-moribund ancestor
568 elm, but its flexibility and excellent handling of MIME and PGP put it
569 in a class by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support, though.
572 <h2><a id="G10" name="G10">G10. How can I avoid sending my password
575 <p>Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this
576 ranges from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to
579 <p>In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
580 transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
581 retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
582 insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
583 TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
584 concentrator or DSL POP you dial in to and the mailserver host).</p>
586 <p>Having realized this, you need to ask whether password
587 encryption alone will really address your security exposure. If you
588 think you might be snooped between server and client, it's better
589 to use end-to-end encryption such as GnuPG (see below) on your whole
590 mail stream so none of it can be read. One of the advantages of
591 fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push delivery is that you may be able
592 to arrange encryption by using ssh(1); see <a href="#K3">K3</a>.</p>
594 <p>Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your
595 mail could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from
596 wherever it originated. For best security, agree with your
597 correspondents to use a tool such as <a
598 href="http://www.gnupg.org/">GnuPG</a> (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP
599 (Pretty Good Privacy).</p>
601 <p>If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for
602 you to set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious
603 cracker from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your
604 connection continuously or crack root on the server in order to
607 <p>You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available
608 by looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response
609 to a CAPABILITY query). Do a <code>fetchmail -v</code> to see
610 these, or telnet direct to the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for
613 <p>If your mailserver is using IMAP 2000, it'll have CRAM-MD5
614 support built in. Fetchmail autodetects this; you can skip the rest
617 <p>The POP3 facility you are most likely to have available is APOP.
618 This is a POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's
619 autoprobe facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If
620 you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
621 angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
622 part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
623 For some hosts, you need to register a secret on the host (using
624 <code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like that). Specify the
625 secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
626 encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
627 back the the server for verification. Note that APOP is no longer
628 considered secure since March 2007.</p>
630 <p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
631 you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
632 client machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at
635 <p>Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
636 variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server
637 to see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the
638 greeting line on port 110). The other is an IMAP and POP3 facility
639 described by RFC1731 and RFC1734. You can tell if this one is
640 present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in the CAPABILITY
643 <p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
644 use their RPA authentication. See <a href="#I1">I1</a> for details.
645 If you are fetching mail from
646 Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
648 <p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
649 one-time passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the
650 2.2 version of the Qualcomm popper from <a href="#cmetz">Craig
651 Metz</a>). To check this, look for the string "otp-" in the
652 greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail was built with
653 OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL file),
654 fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify a
655 password but it will not be sent en clair.</p>
657 <p>You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from <a id="cmetz"
658 name="cmetz">Craig Metz</a> at <a
659 href="http://www.inner.net/opie">http://www.inner.net/opie</a>.</p>
661 <p>These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP"
662 because there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail
663 also uses this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They
664 better, because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)</p>
666 <p>Finally, you can use <a href="#K5">SSL</a> for complete
667 end-to-end encryption if you have an SSL-enabled mailserver.</p>
669 <h2><a id="G11" name="G11">G11. Is any special configuration needed
670 to use a dynamic IP address?</a></h2>
672 <p>Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
673 (notably <a href="#T3">exim</a>), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO
674 address it feeds the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname
675 part. Normally it does this by appending @ and "localhost", but
676 when you are using Kerberos or ETRN mode it will append @ and your
677 machine's fully-qualified domain name (FQDN).</p>
679 <p>Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running
680 in daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your
681 client machine had when it started up.</p>
683 <p>Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation
684 time) doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result
685 is that your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses.
686 More frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent
687 host address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your
688 mail to the wrong machine!</p>
690 <p>Use the <code>smtpaddress</code> option to force the appended
691 hostname to one with a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your
692 <code>/etc/hosts</code>. (The name 'localhost' will usually work;
693 or you can use the IP address itself.)</p>
695 <p>Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP
696 address, '<code>interface</code>'. This option can be used to set
697 the gateway device and restrict the IP address range fetchmail will
698 use. Such a restriction is sometimes useful for security reasons,
699 especially on multihomed sites. See <a href="#C3">C3</a>.</p>
701 <p>I recommend against trying to set up the <code>interface</code>
702 option when initially developing your poll configuration – it's
703 never necessary to do this just to get a link working. Get the link
704 working first, observe the actual address range you see on
705 connections, and add an <code>interface</code> option (if you need
708 <p>You can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP
709 changes your IP address occasionally, possibly with every connect).
710 You need to have your own registered domain and a definite IP
711 address registered for that domain. The server needs to be
712 configured to accept mail for your domain but then queue it to
713 forward to your machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its
714 queue for your domain. Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in
717 <p>You can use On-Demand Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP
718 address; that's what it was designed for, and it provides
719 capabilities very similar to ETRN. Unfortunately ODMR servers are
720 still not yet widely deployed, as of 2006.</p>
722 <p>If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other
723 (non-fetchmail) problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that
724 some sites will bounce your email because the hostname you're giving
725 them isn't real (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse
726 DNS on your dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you
727 need to hack your sendmail so it masquerades as your host.
734 <p>in your <code>sendmail.cf</code> will work, or you can set</p>
737 MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)
740 <p>in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases,
741 replace <code>smarthost.here</code> with the actual name of your
742 mailhost.) See the <a
743 href="http://www.lege.com/sendmail-FAQ.txt">sendmail FAQ</a> for
746 <h2><a id="G12" name="G12">G12. Is any special configuration needed
747 to use firewalls?</a></h2>
749 <p>No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
750 indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about
751 SOCKS, and download the SOCKS software including server and client
752 code, at the <a href="http://www.socks.nec.com/">SOCKS distribution
755 <p>The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at <a
756 href="#K1">K1</a></p>
758 <h2><a id="G13" name="G13">G13. Is any special configuration needed
759 to <em>send</em> mail?</a></h2>
761 <p>A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do
762 I need to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?</p>
764 <p>Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
765 preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
766 automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
767 connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
768 connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.</p>
770 <p>Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on
771 most Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in
772 the outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
773 automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
774 connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.</p>
776 <h2><a id="G14" name="G14">G14. Is fetchmail
777 Y2K-compliant?</a></h2>
779 <p>Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.</p>
781 <p>Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit
782 time_t counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps
783 aren't used for anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you
784 aren't running on a 64-bit machine by then, you'll deserve to
787 <h2><a id="G15" name="G15">G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to
788 support disconnected IMAP mode?</a></h2>
790 <p>No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a
791 protocol gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected
792 operation requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very
793 different problem.</p>
795 <h2><a id="G16" name="G16">G16. How will fetchmail perform under
796 heavy loads?</a></h2>
798 <p>Fetchmail streams message bodies line-by-line; the most core it
799 ever requires per message is enough memory to hold the RFC822
800 header, and that storage is freed when body processing begins. It
801 is, accordingly, quite economical in its use of memory. It will store
802 the UID or UIDL data in core however, which can become considerable if
803 you are keeping lots of messages on the server.</p>
805 <p>After startup time, a fetchmail running in daemon mode stats its
806 configuration file once per poll cycle to see whether it has
807 changed and should be rescanned. Other than that, a fetchmail in
808 normal operation doesn't touch the disk at all; that job is left up
809 to the MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.</p>
811 <p>Fetchmail's performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on
812 the POP server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server.
813 This is not a problem readily solved by tuning fetchmail, or even
814 by buying more TCP/IP capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth
815 but not necessarily latency).</p>
818 <h1>Build-time problems</h1>
819 <h2><a id="B1" name="B1"><strike>B1. Make coughs and dies when building on
820 FreeBSD.</strike></a></h2>
822 <p style="font-style:italic;">As of release 6.3.0, fetchmail's
823 Makefile[.in] should work flawlessly with BSD's portable make used on
824 FreeBSD. With older releases, use GNU make (usually installed as
825 <code>gmake</code>; otherwise try <kbd>pkg_add -r gmake</kbd>).</p>
827 <h2><a id="B2" name="B2">B2. Lex bombs out while building the
828 fetchmail lexer.</a></h2>
830 <p>fetchmail 6.3.0 and newer ship with the lexer and parser in .c
831 formats, so you do not need to use lex unless you hacked the .l or .y
834 <p>fetchmail's lexer has been developed with GNU flex and uses some of
835 its specialties, so the lexer cannot be compiled with the lex tools
836 shipped by some UNIX vendors (HP, SGI, Sun).</p>
838 <h2><a id="B3" name="B3">B3. I get link failures when I try to
839 build fetchmail.</a></h2>
841 <p>If you get errors resembling these:</p>
844 mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto '__res_search'
845 mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to '__dn_skipname'
846 mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
847 mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to '__dn_expand'
848 make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1
851 <p>then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your
852 Makefile once you have installed the 'bind' package.</p>
854 <p>If you get link errors involving <tt>dcgettext</tt>, like
858 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyparse':
859 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
860 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
861 rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
862 rcfile_y.o: In function 'yyerror':
863 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
864 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to 'dcgettext__'
865 rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to 'dcgettext__' follow
868 <p>install an up to date version of GNU gettext, reconfigure and rebuild
869 fetchmail. If that does not help, reconfigure with '--disable-nls' added
870 to the "./configure" command and rebuild.</p>
872 <h2><a id="B4" name="B4">B4. I get build failures in the intl
875 <p>Reconfigure with <tt>--disable-nls</tt> and recompile.</p>
878 <h1>Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions</h1>
879 <h2><a id="F1" name="F1">F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no
880 longer work?</a></h2>
882 <h3>If your file predates 6.3.0</h3>
884 <p>The <tt>netsec</tt> option was discontinued and needs to be
887 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.9</h3>
889 <p>If you were using ETRN mode, change your <tt>smtphost</tt>
890 option to a <tt>fetchdomains</tt> option.</p>
892 <h3>If your file predates 5.8.3</h3>
894 <p>The <tt>'via localhost'</tt> special case for use with ssh tunnelling is
895 gone. Use the <tt>%h</tt> feature of <tt>plugin</tt> instead.</p>
897 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.8</h3>
899 <p>In 5.6.8, the <tt>preauth</tt> keyword and option were changed
900 back to <tt>auth</tt>. The <tt>preauth</tt> synonym will still be
901 supported through a few more point releases.</p>
903 <h3>If your file predates 5.6.5</h3>
905 <p>The <tt>imap-gss</tt>, <tt>imap-k4</tt>, and <tt>imap-login</tt>
906 protocol types are gone. This is a result of a major re-factoring
907 of the authentication machinery; fetchmail can now use Kerberos V4
908 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but with POP3 servers that have
909 RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.</p>
911 <p>When trying to identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver,
912 fetchmail now first tries methods that don't require a password
913 (GSSAPI, KERBEROS_IV); then it looks for methods that mask your
914 password (CRAM-MD5, X-OTP); and only if it the server doesn't
915 support any of those will it ship your password en clair.</p>
917 <p>Setting the <tt>preauth</tt> option to any value other than
918 'password' will prevent from looking for a password in your
919 <tt>.netrc</tt> file or querying for it at startup time.</p>
921 <h3>If your file predates 5.1.0</h3>
923 <p>In 5.1.0, the <tt>auth</tt> keyword and option were changed to
924 <tt>preauth</tt>.</p>
926 <h3>If your file predates 4.5.5</h3>
928 <p>If the <code>dns</code> option is on (the default), you may need
929 to make sure that any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for
930 an SMTP target) is a canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order
931 to avoid DNS overhead and complications, fetchmail no longer tries
932 to derive the fetchmail client machine's canonical DNS name at
935 <h3>If your file predates 4.0.6:</h3>
937 <p>Just after the '<code>via</code>' option was introduced, I
938 realized that the interactions between the '<code>via</code>',
939 '<code>aka</code>', and '<code>localdomains</code>' options were
940 out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
941 much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users
942 were being unpleasantly surprised.</p>
944 <p>Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it.
945 The redesign simplified the code and made the options more
946 orthogonal, but may have broken some complex multidrop
949 <p>Any multidrop configurations that depended on the name just
950 after the '<code>poll</code>' or '<code>skip</code>' keyword being
951 still interpreted as a DNS name for address-matching purposes, even
952 in the presence of a '<code>via</code>' option, will break.</p>
954 <p>It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations
955 (such as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV
956 tickets) might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky
957 that we can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you,
958 contact the maintainer.</p>
960 <h3>If your file predates 3.9.5:</h3>
962 <p>The '<code>remote</code>' keyword has been changed to
963 '<code>folder</code>'. If you try to use the old keyword, the
964 parser will utter a warning.</p>
966 <h3>If your file predates 3.9:</h3>
968 <p>It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written
969 in the old popclient syntax without an explicit
970 '<code>username</code>' keyword leading the first user entry
971 attached to a server entry.</p>
973 <p>This error can be triggered by having a user option such as
974 '<code>keep</code>' or '<code>fetchall</code>' before the first
975 explicit username. For example, if you write</p>
978 poll openmail protocol pop3
979 keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here
982 <p>the '<code>keep</code>' option will generate an entire user
983 entry with the default username (the name of fetchmail's invoking
986 <p>The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It
987 complicated the configuration file grammar and confused users.</p>
989 <h3>If your file predates 2.8:</h3>
991 <p>The '<code>interface</code>', '<code>monitor</code>' and
992 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options changed after 2.8.</p>
994 <p>They used to be global options with '<code>set</code>' syntax
995 like the batchlimit and logfile options. Now they're per-server
996 options, like '<code>protocol</code>'.</p>
998 <p>If you had something like</p>
1001 set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"
1004 <p>in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
1005 'interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
1006 'defaults' declaration.</p>
1008 <p>Do similarly for any '<code>monitor</code>' or
1009 '<code>batchlimit</code>' options.</p>
1011 <h2><a id="F2" name="F2">F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1012 my all-numeric user name.</a></h2>
1014 <p>Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes
1017 <p>The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions
1018 treated any all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when
1019 it was expecting a name. String quoting forces the token's
1022 <p>The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes
1023 any token following "username" or "password" is a string.</p>
1025 <h2><a id="F3" name="F3">F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept
1026 my host or username beginning with 'no'.</a></h2>
1028 <p>See <a href="#F2">F2</a>. You're caught in an unfortunate crack
1029 between the newer-style syntax for negated options ('no keep', 'no
1030 rewrite' etc.) and the older style run-on syntax ('nokeep',
1031 'norewrite' etc.).</p>
1033 <p>Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes
1034 around your token.</p>
1036 <h2><a id="F4" name="F4">F4. I'm getting a 'parse error' message I
1037 don't understand.</a></h2>
1039 <p>The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a
1040 server option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll
1041 probably find that by moving one or more options closer to the
1042 'poll' keyword you can eliminate the problem.</p>
1044 <p>Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
1045 Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the 'defaults'
1046 feature to work.</p>
1049 <h1>Configuration questions</h1>
1050 <h2><a id="C1" name="C1">C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when
1051 running as root on my own machine?</a></h2>
1053 <p>Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:</p>
1055 <p>On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as
1056 root from a cron job, like this:</p>
1059 fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net
1062 <p>This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's
1063 home directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't
1064 remember). But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user,
1065 unless I create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory
1069 skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
1073 <p>It won't work if the second line is just "<code>user
1074 itz</code>". This is silly.</p>
1076 <p>It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the 'default local user'
1077 (i.e. the uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases,
1078 and the 'default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They
1083 <p>No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't
1084 much like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The
1085 problem is that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a
1086 local user 'itz' actually exists.</p>
1088 <p>"Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if
1089 the remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two
1092 <p>One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host
1093 declared that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You
1096 <p>Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same
1097 person? They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are
1098 unless local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it
1099 (that is, the server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc
1102 <p>Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking
1103 about ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find
1104 that all the alternatives to the present default are worse or
1105 unacceptably more complicated or both.</p>
1107 <h2><a id="C2" name="C2">C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail
1108 daemon to get killed when I log out?</a></h2>
1110 <p>The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
1111 reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
1112 arrange for the command 'fetchmail -q' to be called on logout.
1113 Under bash, you can arrange this by putting 'fetchmail -q' in the
1114 file '~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute '~/.logout' on
1115 logout. For other shells, consult your shell manual page.</p>
1117 <p>Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to
1118 arrange if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the
1119 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some
1120 shell code you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout
1121 profiles that will accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere
1122 <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.</p>
1124 <p>Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up
1125 and ppp-down scripts of pppd.</p>
1127 <h2><a id="C3" name="C3">C3. How do I know what interface and
1128 address to use with --interface?</a></h2>
1130 <p>This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and
1131 right now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer
1132 BSDs). However, here are some important rules of thumb that can
1133 help. If they don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet
1136 <p>First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your
1137 machine only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost
1138 certainly by a point to point modem connection to your provider's
1139 local subnet that's pretty secure against snooping (unless someone
1140 can tap your phone or the provider's local subnet!). Under these
1141 circumstances, specifying an interface address is fairly
1144 <p>What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
1145 provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider
1146 IP addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the
1147 modem and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
1148 (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
1149 Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
1150 --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the
1151 one secure link.</p>
1153 <p>To determine the device:</p>
1156 <li>If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably
1159 <li>If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably
1162 <li>If you're using a direct connection over a local network such
1163 as an ethernet, use the command 'netstat -r' to look at your
1164 routing table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination
1165 entry; if you don't see it in the first column, use the 'default'
1166 entry. The device name will be in the rightmost column.</li>
1169 <p>To determine the address and netmask:</p>
1172 <li>If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
1173 10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
1174 slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)</li>
1176 <li>If you have a static IP address, run 'ifconfig <device>',
1177 where <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP
1178 address given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your
1179 end of the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
1182 <li>If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
1183 randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
1184 significant bits change from connection to connection). You need to
1185 declare an address with the variable bits zero and a complementary
1186 netmask that sets the range.</li>
1189 <p>To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose
1190 you're hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the
1191 dynamic address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
1192 205.164.136.255. Then</p>
1195 interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"
1198 <p>would work. To range over any value of the last two octets
1199 (65536 addresses) you would use</p>
1202 interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
1205 <h2><a id="C4" name="C4">C4. How can I set up support for
1206 sendmail's anti-spam features?</a></h2>
1208 <p>This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.9.3-20 (the
1209 version installed in Red Hat 6.2) upwards. If you have an older
1210 version, upgrade to sendmail 8.9.</p>
1212 <p>Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a
1213 database of filter rules. The human-readable form of the database
1214 is at <tt>/etc/mail/access</tt>. The database itself is at
1215 <tt>/etc/mail/access.db</tt>.</p>
1217 <p>The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
1218 numbers as keys. For example,</p>
1221 spammer@aol.com REJECT
1222 cyberspammer.com REJECT
1226 <p>would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from
1227 cyberspammer.com (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain),
1228 and any host on the 192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be
1229 used to do other things as well; see the <a
1230 href="http://www.sendmail.org/m4/anti_spam.html">sendmail
1231 documentation</a> for details)</p>
1233 <p>To actually set up the database, run</p>
1236 makemap hash deny <deny
1239 <p>in /etc/mail.</p>
1241 <p>To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host
1242 and then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument.
1243 You can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is
1244 parsed, if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist,
1245 fetchmail will flush and delete it.</p>
1247 <p>Under no circumstances put your <strong>mailhost</strong> or
1248 <strong>any host you accept mail from</strong> using fetchmail into
1249 your reject file. You <strong>will</strong> lose mail if you do
1252 <h2><a id="C5" name="C5">C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes
1253 more/less often than others?</a></h2>
1255 <p>Use the <cite>interval</cite> keyword on the ones that should be
1256 checked less often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes,
1257 and want to poll some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30
1258 minutes, use something like this:</p>
1261 poll mainsite.example.com proto pop3 user ....
1262 poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...
1265 <p>Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
1266 mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of
1267 every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
1268 every 30 minutes.</p>
1270 <h2><a id="C6" name="C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
1271 but not from an init script.</a></h2>
1273 <p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
1274 interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
1275 when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or
1276 set to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means
1277 fetchmail at startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.</p>
1279 <p>Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's
1280 -f option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the
1283 <h2><a id="C7" name="C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
1286 <p>To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running
1287 fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
1288 <code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
1290 <h2><a id="C8" name="C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
1293 <p>Some users want to write scripts that take action only if mail
1294 could/could not be retrieved, thus fetchmail reports if it has retrieved
1295 messages or not.</p>
1297 <p>If you do not want "no mail" to be an error condition (for instance,
1298 for cron jobs), use a POSIX-compliant shell and add this to the end of
1299 the fetchmail command line, it will change an exit code of 1 to 0 and
1305 <p>If you want to map more than one code to 0, you cannot cascade multiple
1306 <strong>|| [ $? -eq N ]</strong>, but you must instead use the
1307 <strong>-o</strong> operator inside the brackets, (see the test(1)
1308 manpage for details), such as:</p>
1311 || [ $? -eq 1 -o $? -eq 9 ]
1314 <p>A full cron line might then look like this:</p>
1317 */15 * * * * fetchmail -s || [ $? -eq 1 ]
1322 <h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
1323 <h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
1326 <p>For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric
1327 Allman tells me that if <code>FEATURE(always_add_domain)</code> is
1328 included in sendmail's configuration, you can leave the
1329 <code>rewrite</code> option off.</p>
1331 <p>If your sendmail complains "sendmail does not relay", make
1332 sure your sendmail.cf file says <code>Cwlocalhost</code> so that
1333 sendmail recognizes 'localhost' as a name of its host.</p>
1335 <p>If you're mailing from another machine on your local network,
1336 also ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in
1337 name_allow (usually in /etc/mail/)</p>
1339 <p>If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
1340 'FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
1341 fetchmail generates), you may have to set
1342 <code>FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders)</code>.</p>
1344 <p>Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't
1345 work with fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "<code>553
1346 Local configuration error, hostname not recognized as
1347 local</code>". The problem is that fetchmail normally feeds
1348 sendmail with the client machine's host address in the MAIL FROM
1349 line. These sendmails think this means they're seeing the result of
1350 a mail loop and suppress the mail. You may be able to work around
1351 this by running in <code>--invisible</code> mode.</p>
1353 <p>If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to
1354 your mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this
1358 H?l?Delivered-To: $h
1361 <p>This will cause the mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the
1362 appropriate envelope address into each message before fetchmail
1363 sees it, and tell fetchmail which header it is.  With this
1364 change, multidrop mode should work reliably even when the Received
1365 header omits the envelope address (which will typically be the case
1366 when the message has multiple recipients).  However it will
1367 still not distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that
1368 no bounce will be sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple
1369 users at your site.  To fix even that problem, you might want
1370 to try the following hack, which is however untested and quite
1374 H?J?Delivered-To: $u
1376 Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
1377 S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
1378 T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
1379 A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h
1382 <p>For both hacks, you have to declare '<code>envelope
1383 "Delivered-To:"</code>' on the fetchmail side, to put the virtual
1384 domain (e.g. 'domain.com') with RELAY permission into your access
1385 file and to add a line reading '<code>domain.com
1386 local:local-pop-user</code>' for the first and '<code>domain.com
1387 mdrop:local-pop-user</code>' for the second hack to your
1390 <p>You will notice that if the mail already has a Delivered-To
1391 header, sendmail will not add another.  Further, editing
1392 sendmail.cf directly is not very comfortable.  Solutions for
1393 both problems can be found in Peter 'Rattacresh' Backes' 'hybrid'
1394 patch against sendmail.  Have a look at it, you can find it in
1395 the contrib subdirectory.</p>
1397 <p>Feel free to try Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the
1398 contrib subdirectory of the fetchmail source distribution, it
1399 attempts to realize multidrop mailboxes with an external
1402 <p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
1403 <tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
1404 don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
1405 occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
1406 sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
1407 at start of a text line.</p>
1409 <h2><a id="T2" name="T2">T2. How can I use fetchmail with
1412 <h3>qmail as your local SMTP server</h3>
1414 <p>Avoid <a href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/qmail-bugs.html">qmail,
1415 it's broken and unmaintained.</a></p>
1417 <p>Turn on the <code>forcecr</code> option; qmail's listener mode
1418 doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare
1420 (This information contributed by Robert de Bath
1421 <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)</p>
1423 <h3>qmail as your ISP's POP3 server</h3>
1425 <p>Note that qmail's POP3 server, as of version 1.03 and netqmail 1.05,
1426 miscalculates the message sizes, so you may see size-related fetchmail
1429 <p>If a mailhost is using the qmail package, then it is usually possible
1430 to set up one fetchmail link to reliably collect the mail for an entire
1433 <p>One of the basic features of qmail is the 'Delivered-To:'
1434 message header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local
1435 mailbox it puts the username and hostname of the envelope recipient
1436 on this line. One major reason for this is to prevent mail
1437 loops, the other is to transport envelope information which is essential
1438 for multidrop (domain-in-a-mailbox) schemes.</p>
1440 <p>To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site, the
1441 ISP-mailhost will have normally put that site in its 'virtualhosts'
1442 control file so it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this
1443 site. This results in mail sent to
1444 'username@userhost.userdom.example.com' having a 'Delivered-To:' line
1448 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.example.com
1451 <p>A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:</p>
1454 Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.example.com
1457 <p>The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose
1458 but a string matching the user host name is likely.</p>
1460 <p>To use this line you must:</p>
1463 <li>Ensure the option '<code>envelope "Delivered-To"</code>' is in the fetchmail
1466 <li>Ensure the option '<code>qvirtual "mbox-userstr-"</code>' is
1467 in the fetchmail config file, in order to remove this prefix from the
1468 username. (added by Luca Olivetti)</li>
1470 <li>Ensure you have a <code>localdomains</code> option containing
1471 '<code>userdom.example.com</code>' or '<code>userhost.userdom.example.com</code>'
1475 <h2><a id="T3" name="T3">T3. How can I use fetchmail with
1478 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> on:</p>
1480 <p>There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO
1481 addresses you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully
1482 qualified hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully
1483 qualified RCPT TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept
1484 'localhost' as a fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.</p>
1486 <p>In exim.conf, add 'localhost' to your local_domains declaration
1487 if it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
1488 thyrsus.com would have a line reading:</p>
1491 local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost
1494 <p>If you have <code>rewrite</code> off:</p>
1496 <p>MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
1497 fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
1498 addresses, and fetchmail's <code>rewrite</code> option is off. The
1499 specific case where this has come up involves bounce messages
1500 generated by sendmail on your mailer host, which have the
1501 (un-canonicalized) origin address MAILER-DAEMON.</p>
1503 <p>The right way to fix this is to enable the <code>rewrite</code>
1504 option and have fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path
1505 addresses with the mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This
1506 option is enabled by default, so it won't be off unless you turned
1509 <p>If you must run with <code>rewrite</code> off, there is a switch
1510 in exim's configuration files that allows it to accept domainless
1511 MAIL FROM addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the
1515 sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost
1518 <p>in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that
1519 this will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name
1520 attached to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname
1521 rather than that of the remote mail server).</p>
1523 <h2><a id="T4" name="T4">T4. How can I use fetchmail with
1526 <p>Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may
1527 work fine out of the box.</p>
1529 <p>We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
1530 single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
1531 other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
1532 scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem,
1533 it is an smail 'feature' and has been reported to the maintainers
1536 <p>Very recent smail versions require an
1537 <code>-smtp_hello_verify</code> option in the smail config file.
1538 This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO address is
1539 actually that of the client machine, which is never going to be the
1540 case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123 an SMTP
1541 listener <em>must</em> allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
1542 (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.</p>
1544 <p>You may also need to say
1545 <code>-smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1</code> in order for smail
1546 to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
1547 recipient addresses.</p>
1549 <h2><a id="T5" name="T5">T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's
1552 <p>MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
1553 connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You
1555 href="http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/uucptofetch.html">MMDF
1556 recipe</a> that describes replacing a UUCP link with fetchmail
1559 <h2><a id="T6" name="T6">T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus
1562 <p>The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should
1563 convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and
1564 correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'.</p>
1566 <h2><a id="T7" name="T7">T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier
1569 <p>The courier mta doesn't like RCPT addresses that look like
1570 <code>someone@localhost</code>. Work around this with an
1571 <code>smtphost</code> or <code>smtpaddress</code>.</p>
1573 <h2><a name="T8">T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?</a></h2>
1575 <p>vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.</p>
1577 <p>As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.</p>
1580 <h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
1581 <h2><a id="S1" name="S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with
1582 qpopper?</strike></a></h2>
1584 <p><em>The information that used to be here was obsolete and dropped.</em></p>
1586 <h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
1589 <p>It's been reliably reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is
1590 so broken that it's unusable. One symptom is that messages without
1591 a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
1592 -- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
1593 with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
1594 other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
1596 <p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
1597 attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
1598 as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
1600 <p>Fetchmail using IMAP usually supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
1601 with Microsoft Exchange servers. "Usually" here means that it fails on some
1602 servers for reasons that we haven't been able to debug yet, perhaps it's
1603 related to the NTLM domain.</p>
1605 <p>To enable this NTLM mode, configure fetchmail with
1606 the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
1607 value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
1608 will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
1611 <p>Microsoft Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
1612 does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
1613 sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
1614 (thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
1617 <p>Fetchmail works with Microsoft Exchange, despite this brain damage.
1618 Two features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
1619 work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
1620 The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
1621 ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
1622 problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
1623 listener's configured length limit).</p>
1625 <p>ESR learned that there's supposed to be a
1626 registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
1629 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1630 System\Pop3 Compatibility
1633 <p>This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
1634 protocol. The bits defined are:</p>
1637 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1639 <dd>Report exact message sizes for the LIST command</dd>
1641 <dt>0x00000002:</dt>
1643 <dd>Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
1646 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1648 <dd>Enable the LAST command</dd>
1650 <dt>0x00000008:</dt>
1652 <dd>Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
1653 passwords, but illegal in the protocol)</dd>
1655 <dt>0x00000010:</dt>
1657 <dd>Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
1658 (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
1661 <dt>0x00000020:</dt>
1663 <dd>Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.</dd>
1666 <p>There's another one that may be useful to know about:</p>
1669 KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
1670 System\Pop3 Performance
1674 <dt>0x00000001:</dt>
1676 <dd>Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
1677 directly from the database (should always be on)</dd>
1679 <dt>0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
1680 commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
1681 reported in KB Q168109)</dt>
1683 <dt>0x00000004:</dt>
1685 <dd>Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
1689 <p>The Microsoft employee who revealed this information to ESR
1690 admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
1693 <p>Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has
1694 as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
1695 Grant Edwards writes:</p>
1697 <blockquote><p>This means that Exchange Server is too [...] stupid to
1698 figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
1699 keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
1700 half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
1701 name from your username.</p>
1703 <p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
1704 than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
1705 username maps to zero mailboxes.</p>
1707 <p>You've got several options:</p>
1710 <li>Get your administrator to configure the server so that
1711 usernames and mailbox names are the same.</li>
1713 <li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
1714 explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
1718 <p>But, the best option involves finding a server that runs better
1721 <h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
1724 <p>No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions
1725 prior to 6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in <a
1726 href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a>. The message sizes it gives in
1727 the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
1728 habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
1729 Resent- headers.</p>
1730 <p>OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
1733 <p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
1734 command fails, returning only one line regardless of its argument,
1735 on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
1737 <h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
1739 <p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server is (according to the designer of
1740 IMAP) unusably broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required
1741 content length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
1743 <p>Fetchmail works around this problem to some extent, but no guarantees.</p>
1745 <h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
1746 InterChange?</a></h2>
1748 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1749 attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server (<a
1750 href="#S6">see below</a>):
1751 it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
1752 them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1754 <p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent ESR mail informing
1755 him that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixed this
1758 <h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
1760 <p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
1761 attachments. MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with
1762 attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.</p>
1764 <p>Also, we're told that TOP sometimes fails to retrieve the entire
1765 message even when enough lines have been specified. The MailMax
1766 developers have acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there
1767 is no fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the
1768 <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1770 <h2><a id="S7" name="S7">S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?</a></h2>
1772 <p>The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a
1773 weird bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the
1774 <code>fetchall</code> option to force use of RETR and work around
1778 <h1>How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs</h1>
1779 <h2><a id="I1" name="I1">I1. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?</a></h2>
1781 <p>First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in.
1782 Stock fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't.
1783 You can check this by looking at the output of <code>fetchmail
1784 -V</code>; if you see the string "+RPA" after the version ID you're
1785 good to go, otherwise you'll have to build your own from sources
1786 (see the INSTALL file in the source distribution for
1789 <p>Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password.
1790 Add '@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like 'user
1791 <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either
1792 your numerical userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled
1793 fetchmail will automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's
1794 greeting line. If that's found, and your user ID ends with
1795 '@compuserve.com', it will query the server to see if it is
1796 RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA transaction rather than a
1797 plain-text password handshake.</p>
1799 <p><strong>Warning:</strong> the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail
1800 will show your pass-phrase in Unicode!</p>
1802 <p>These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an
1803 RPA and non-RPA configuration:</p>
1806 # This version will use RPA
1807 poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1808 user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
1809 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1811 # This version will not use RPA
1812 poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
1813 user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
1814 is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
1817 <h2><a id="I2" name="I2">I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon
1818 Internet's SDPS?</a></h2>
1820 <h3>Single-drop mode</h3>
1822 <p>You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user
1823 from Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username
1824 consisting of your Demon user name followed by your account name,
1825 with an at-sign between them.</p>
1827 <p>For example, to download email for the user
1828 <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following
1829 .fetchmailrc file:</p>
1832 set postmaster "philh"
1833 poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
1834 user "philh@vision25" is philh
1837 <h3>Multi-drop mode</h3>
1839 <p>Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
1840 messages have a Received: header added when they enter the
1841 maildrop, like this:</p>
1844 Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
1845 id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT
1848 <p>To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that
1849 'mailstore' is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and
1850 let it know the hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The
1851 following example assumes that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk,
1852 and that you have also bought "mail forwarding" for the domain
1853 my-company.co.uk (in which case your MTA must also be configured to
1854 accept mail sent to user@my-company.co.uk)</p>
1857 poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
1858 localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
1862 <p>Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than
1863 30 days old; see their <a
1864 href="http://www.demon.net/helpdesk/producthelp/mail/sdps-tech.html/">POP3
1865 page</a> for details.</p>
1867 <h3>The SDPS extension</h3>
1869 <p>There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on
1870 Demon Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but
1871 the person who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful
1872 if Demon Internet ever changes mail transports.</p>
1874 <p>SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the
1875 envelope of a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports
1876 if compiled with the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the
1877 first line of the fetchmail -V response will include the string
1880 <p>Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
1881 automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
1882 multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
1885 <p>The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
1886 greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy
1887 it may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.</p>
1889 <h2><a id="I3" name="I3">I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's
1892 <p>Enable '<code>fetchall</code>'. A user reports that the 2.2
1893 version of USA.NET's POP server reports that you must use the
1894 '<code>fetchall</code>' option to make sure that all of the mail is
1895 retrieved, otherwise some may be left on the server. This is almost
1896 certainly a server bug.</p>
1898 <p>The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998)
1899 don't handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the
1900 argument you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the
1901 message. Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order
1902 to avoid marking messages seen, but '<code>fetchall</code>' forces
1903 it to use RETR instead.</p>
1905 <p>Also, we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages.
1906 You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
1907 to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
1909 <h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
1910 POP3 servers?</a></h2>
1912 <p>Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3
1913 servers fail to include the first Received line of the message in
1914 the send to fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA
1915 interprets Received continuations as body lines and doesn't parse
1916 any of the following headers.</p>
1918 <p>Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "--mda" switch:</p>
1921 mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"
1924 <p>Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character.</p>
1926 <p>You should also consider using "fetchall" option because
1927 Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
1928 already been read.</p>
1930 <h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
1932 <p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
1933 webmail with the help of the <a
1934 href='http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/'>HotWayDaemon</a>
1935 daemon. You don't even need to install hotwayd as a daemon in
1936 <samp>inetd.conf</samp> but can use it as a plugin. Your
1937 configuration should look like this:</p>
1940 poll localhost protocol pop3 tracepolls
1941 plugin "/usr/local/sbin/hotwayd -l 0 -p yourproxy:yourproxyport"
1942 username "youremail@hotmail.com" password "yourpassword"
1946 <p>As a second option you may consider using <a
1947 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a>.</p>
1949 <h2><a id="I6" name="I6">I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?</a></h2>
1951 <p>You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
1952 authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't
1953 document it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.</p>
1955 <p>This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN
1956 as the only appropriate response.</p>
1958 <p>As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
1959 authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
1960 MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be
1963 <h2><a id="I7" name="I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a></h2>
1965 <p>The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as
1966 seen. This means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it
1967 may end up invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the
1968 <code>fetchall</code> flag to ensure that it's recovered on the
1971 <h2><a id="I8" name="I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or
1972 other Maillennium servers?</a></h2>
1974 <p>Stock fetchmail will work with a
1975 Maillennium POP3/PROXY server... <em>but</em> this server will
1976 truncate "TOP" responses after 64 - 82 kB (we have varying reports),
1977 in violation of Internet Standard #53 aka. RFC-1939 (POP3). Don't
1978 mistake this for a fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.) Comcast
1979 documented they haven't understood what this is about in <a
1980 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2004-April/008523.html">two
1981 messages from April 2004.</a></p>
1983 <p>Beginning with version 6.3.2, fetchmail will fall back to the RETR
1984 command if the greeting string contains "Maillennium POP3/PROXY server",
1985 and print a warning message. This means however that fetchmail has no
1986 means to prevent the "seen" flag from being set on the server (Note that
1987 officially, POP3 has no notion of seen tracking, but it works for some
1990 <p>Workaround for older versions: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
1992 <h2><a id="I9" name="I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a></h2>
1994 <p>Google's IMAP servers, as of April 2008, are broken and re-encode
1995 MIME-encoded headers improperly and are not feature-complete yet. The
1996 model how their servers organize mail also deviates in significant ways
1997 from what the POP3 or IMAP protocol 'fathers' conceived. This means all
1998 sorts of strange effects, for instance, your sent mail may show up in
1999 the mail that fetchmail fetches. It's best to avoid fetching mail from
2000 Google until they are using standards-compliant software.</p>
2003 <h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
2005 <h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
2007 <p>Giuseppe Guerini added a <kbd>--with-socks</kbd> compile-time option
2008 that supports linking with socks library. If you specify the value of
2009 this option as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
2010 library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
2011 directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
2013 <p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar <kbd>--with-socks5</kbd> option that may
2014 work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
2016 <p>In either case, fetchmail has no direct configuration hooks, but you
2017 can specify which socks configuration file the library should read by
2018 means of the <tt>SOCKS_CONF</tt> environment variable. In order to
2019 bypass the SOCKS proxy altogether, you could run (adding your usual
2020 options to the end of this line):</p>
2022 <pre>env SOCKS_CONF=/dev/null fetchmail</pre>
2024 <h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
2027 <p>To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports
2028 IPv6, the "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133).
2031 <p>The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
2033 href="http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/">http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp/</a></p>
2035 <p>More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained
2040 href="http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html">
2041 http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html</a></li>
2044 <h2><a id="K3" name="K3">K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with
2047 <p>Use the <tt>plugin</tt> option. This is dead simple with
2051 plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"
2054 <p>You may have to use a different absolute pathname, whatever the
2055 location of imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells
2056 fetchmail that instead of opening a connection on the server's port
2057 143 and doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to
2058 the server and run imapd, using the more secure ssh authentication
2059 (as well as getting ssh's end-to-end encryption). Most IMAP daemons
2060 will detect that they've been called from the command line and
2061 assume the connection is preauthenticated.</p>
2063 <p>POP3 daemons aren't quite as smart. They won't know they are
2064 preauthenticated in this mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
2065 password. It will be under ssh encryption, though, so that
2066 shouldn't be a problem.</p>
2068 <h2><a id="K4" name="K4">K4. What do I have to do to use the
2069 IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
2071 <p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
2072 identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share
2073 Kerberos V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
2074 IMAP server - those are few.</p>
2076 <p>fetchmail does not compile in support for GSS by
2077 default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
2078 distribution (available via FTP at <a
2079 href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
2080 If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
2081 <code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
2082 configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
2083 installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
2084 --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5</code></p>
2086 <p>Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this
2087 FAQ (you may find Jim Rome's paper <a
2088 href="http://www.ornl.gov/~jar/HowToKerb.html">How to Kerberize
2089 your site</a> helpful), but you'll at least need to add a
2090 credential for imap/[mailhost] to the keytab of the mail server
2091 (IMAP doesn't just use the host key). Then you'll need to have your
2092 credentials ready on your machine (cf. kinit).</p>
2094 <p>After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss
2095 in your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't
2096 need one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only
2097 useful if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your
2098 Kerberos principal.</p>
2100 <p>Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in
2101 cleartext in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.</p>
2103 <h2><a id="K5" name="K5">K5. How can I use fetchmail with
2106 <p>You'll need to have the <a
2107 href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed, and they
2108 should at least be version 0.9.7.
2109 Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
2110 installed in commonly-used default locations, this will
2111 suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
2112 you'll need to specify the OpenSSL installation directory as an argument
2113 to --with-ssl after an equal sign.</p>
2115 <p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
2116 <code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
2117 SSL encryption, and will automatically use <code>tls</code> if the
2118 server offers it. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
2119 use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
2120 of care on the limited security provided.</p>
2122 <p>If your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains
2123 "PRNG not seeded", update or improve your operating system. This
2124 means that the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to
2125 locate a source of random bits from which to seed its random-number
2126 generator; normally these come from the <tt>/dev/urandom</tt>, and
2127 this message probably means your OS doesn't have that device.</p>
2129 <p>An interactive program could seed the random number generator
2130 from keystroke timings or some other form of user input. Because
2131 fetchmail is primarily designed to run forever as a background
2132 daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
2134 <p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
2135 OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work (but will not
2136 authenticate the server):</p>
2139 poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
2140 protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
2143 <p>You should note that SSL is only secure against a "man-in-the-middle"
2144 attack if the client is able to verify that the peer's public key is the
2145 correct one, and has not been substituted by an attacker. fetchmail can do
2146 this in one of two ways: by verifying the SSL certificate, or by checking
2147 the fingerprint of the peer's public key.</p>
2149 <p>There are three parts to SSL certificate verification: checking that the
2150 domain name in the certificate matches the hostname you asked to connect to;
2151 checking that the certificate expiry date has not passed; and checking that
2152 the certificate has been signed by a known Certificate Authority (CA). This
2153 last step takes some preparation, as you need to install the root
2154 certificates of all the CA's which you might come across.</p>
2156 <p>The easiest way to do this is using the root CA keys supplied in the
2157 OpenSSL distribution, which means you need to download and unpack the
2158 source tarball from www.openssl.org. Once you have done that:</p>
2161 <li><code>mkdir /etc/ssl/certs</code></li>
2162 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/certs directory: <code>cp *.pem /etc/ssl/certs/</code></li>
2163 <li>in the openssl-x.x.x/tools directory: edit c_rehash and set
2164 <code>$dir="/etc/ssl"</code></li>
2165 <li>run "perl c_rehash". This generates a number of symlinks within the
2166 /etc/ssl/certs/ directory</li>
2169 <p>Now in .fetchmailrc, set option sslcertpath to point to this
2173 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2174 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar ssl sslcertpath /etc/ssl/certs
2177 <p>If the server certificate has not been signed by a known CA (e.g. it is a
2178 self-signed certificate), then this certificate validation will always
2181 <p>Certificate verification is always attempted. If it fails, by default a
2182 warning is printed but the connection carries on (which means you are not
2183 protected against attack). If your server's certificate has been properly
2184 set up and verifies correctly, then add the "sslcertck" option to enforce
2185 validation. If your server doesn't have a valid certificate though (e.g. it
2186 has a self-signed certificate) then it will never verify, and the only way
2187 you can protect yourself is by checking the fingerprint.</p>
2189 <p>To check the peer fingerprint: first use fetchmail -v once to connect to
2190 the host, at a time when you are pretty sure that there is no attack in
2191 progress (e.g. you are not traversing any untrusted network to reach the
2192 server). Make a note of the fingerprint shown. Now embed this in your
2193 .fetchmailrc using the sslfingerprint option: e.g.</p>
2196 poll pop3.example.com proto pop3 uidl no dns
2197 user foobar@example.com password xyzzy is foobar
2198 ssl sslfingerprint "67:3E:02:94:D3:5B:C3:16:86:71:37:01:B1:3B:BC:E2"
2201 <p>When you next connect, the public key presented by the server will be
2202 verified against the fingerprint given. If it's different, it may mean that
2203 a man-in-the-middle attack is in progress - or it might just mean that the
2204 server changed its key. It's up to you to determine which has happened.</p>
2206 <h2><a id="K6" name="K6">K6. How can I tell fetchmail not to use TLS
2207 if the server advertises it? Why does fetchmail use SSL even
2208 though not configured?</a></h2>
2210 <p>Some servers advertise STLS (POP3) or STARTTLS (IMAP), and fetchmail
2211 will automatically attempt TLS negotiation if SSL was enabled at compile
2212 time. This can however cause problems if the upstream didn't configure
2213 his certificates properly.</p>
2215 <p>In order to prevent fetchmail from trying TLS (STLS, STARTTLS)
2216 negotiation, add this option:</p>
2218 <pre>sslproto ssl23</pre>
2220 <p>This restricts fetchmail's SSL/TLS protocol choice from the default
2221 "SSLv2, SSLv3, TLSv1" to the two SSL variants, disabling TLSv1. Note
2222 however that this causes the connection to be unencrypted unless an
2223 encrypting "plugin" is used or SSL is requested explicitly.</p>
2226 <h1>Runtime fatal errors</h1>
2227 <h2><a id="R1" name="R1">R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows
2228 'SMTP connect failed' messages.</a></h2>
2230 <p>Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25
2231 listener is down or inaccessible.</p>
2233 <p>The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your
2234 smtp host (which is normally 'localhost' unless you've specified an
2235 smtp option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a
2236 greeting line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible
2237 or the listener is down, fix that first.</p>
2239 <p>In Red Hat Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this,
2240 set "DAEMON=yes" in your /etc/sysconfig/sendmail file, then restart
2241 sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".</p>
2243 <p>If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the
2244 most benign and typical problem is that the listener had a
2245 momentary seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was
2246 polling it -- process table full or some other problem that stopped
2247 the listener process from forking. If your SMTP host is not
2248 'localhost' or something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch
2249 could also have been caused by transient nameserver failure.</p>
2251 <p>Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of
2252 these kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups,
2253 because a future fetchmail run will get the mail through.</p>
2255 <p>If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying
2256 to connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to
2257 work around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this
2258 only attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing
2259 problem. You should really try to figure out what's going on
2260 underneath before it bites you some other way.</p>
2262 <p>We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes
2263 solve such problems by doing an <code>smtp</code> declaration with
2264 an IP address that your routing table maps to something other than
2265 the loopback device (he used ppp0).</p>
2267 <p>We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
2268 /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more
2269 than one IP address.</p>
2271 <p>It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
2272 <code>/etc/hosts</code> at all. If you're using libc5, look at
2273 <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>; it should say something like:</p>
2279 <p>so your <code>/etc/hosts</code> file is checked first. If you're
2280 running GNU libc6, check your <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> file.
2281 Make sure it says something like</p>
2287 <p>again, in order to make sure <code>/etc/hosts</code> is seen
2290 <p>If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname
2291 does not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port
2292 25 and even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts,
2293 but fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter
2294 what you set smtpaddress to.</p>
2296 <p>We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who
2297 solved his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to
2298 -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older
2299 Linux distributions the libc bind library version works better.</p>
2301 <p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
2302 library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
2303 won't be, and this particular cause should go away.</p>
2305 <h2><a id="R2" name="R2">R2. When I try to configure an MDA,
2306 fetchmail doesn't work.</a></h2>
2308 <p>(I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line
2309 problem in <a href="#X1">X1</a>.)</p>
2311 <p>Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
2312 command-line options '<code>-k -m cat</code>'. This will dump
2313 exactly what fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the
2314 Received line fetchmail itself adds to the headers).</p>
2316 <p>If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
2317 configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
2318 match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
2321 <h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
2322 invalid rc file.</a></h2>
2324 <p>Note that this bug should no longer occur when using prepackaged
2325 fetchmail versions or installing unmodified original tarballs, since
2326 these ship with a proper parser .c file.</p>
2328 <p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
2329 known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
2330 <code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
2331 building with an archaic version of lex.</p>
2333 <p>Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.</p>
2335 <p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
2336 href="http://flex.sourceforge.net/">flex</a>.</p>
2338 <h2><a id="R4" name="R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
2339 operates normally otherwise.</strike></a></h2>
2341 <p><em>The information that used to be here referred to bugs in Linux libc5
2342 systems, which are deemed obsolete by now.</em></p>
2344 <h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
2345 doesn't work.</a><br/>
2348 <p>We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
2349 fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
2350 same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
2351 similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
2352 report no problem.</p>
2354 <p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
2355 the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
2356 fetchmail. The isolated Linux case has been chased down to a
2357 failure in dup(2) that may reflect a glibc bug.</p>
2359 <p>As a workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an
2360 ampersand to background it. A Sun user recommends this:</p>
2363 (fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)
2366 <p>The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that
2367 the process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is
2368 started and dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it
2369 child of PID 1). This is important when you start fetchmail
2370 interactively and than quit interactive shell. The line above makes
2371 sure fetchmail lives after that!</p>
2373 <h2><a id="R6" name="R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket
2376 <p>Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by
2377 <code>/sbin/ifconfig</code>. If it's over 600, change it in your
2378 PPP options file. (<code>/etc/ppp/options</code> on my box). Here
2379 are option values that work:</p>
2386 <p>Another circumstance that can trigger this is if you are polling
2387 a virtual-mail-server name that is round-robin connected to
2388 different actual servers, so you get different IP addresses on
2389 different poll cycles. To work around this, change the poll name
2390 either to the real name of one of the servers in the ring or to a
2391 corresponding IP address.</p>
2393 <h2><a id="R7" name="R7">R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped
2394 working after an OS upgrade</a></h2>
2396 <p>In RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment
2397 changed from /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move
2398 your .fetchmailrc or use a -f option to explicitly point at the
2399 file. (Oddly, a similar problem has been reported from Debian
2402 <h2><a id="R8" name="R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching
2403 certain messages but before deleting them</a></h2>
2405 <p>There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly
2406 other recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel
2410 <p>TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's
2411 now the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the
2412 tcp connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
2413 fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
2414 allowing for the timestamp.</p>
2416 <p>Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time
2417 (typically 2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
2418 (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
2419 fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this,
2422 <p>echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps</p>
2424 <p>I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
2425 least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
2429 <h2><a id="R9" name="R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message
2432 <p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
2433 command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
2434 data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
2435 packet-fragmentation problem or improper firewall settings break Path
2436 MTU discovery (when for instance all ICMP traffic is blocked), that's
2437 where you'll see it.</p>
2439 <h2><a id="R10" name="R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with
2440 SIGPIPE.</strike></a></h2>
2442 <p><em>Fetchmail 6.3.5 and newer block SIGPIPE, and many older versions have
2443 already handled this signal, so you shouldn't be seeing SIGPIPE
2446 <h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
2447 errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
2449 <p>Your POP3 server is broken. You can work around this with the
2450 declaration <tt>auth password</tt> in your .fetchmailrc.</p>
2452 <h2><a id="R12" name="R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports
2453 getaddrinfo errors.</a></h2>
2454 <ol><li>Make sure you haven't mistyped the host name or address, and that
2455 your DNS is working. If you cannot fix DNS, give the numeric host
2456 literal, for instance, 192.168.0.1</li>
2457 <li>Make sure your <code>/etc/services</code> file (or other
2458 services database) contains the necessary service entries. If you
2459 cannot fix the services database, use the --service option and give the
2460 numeric port address. Common port addresses are:<table
2461 summary="Common port addresses for IMAP, POP3 and their SSL
2463 <tr><th>service</th><th>port</th></tr>
2464 <tr><td>IMAP</td><td>143</td></tr>
2465 <tr><td>IMAP+SSL</td><td>993</td></tr>
2466 <tr><td>POP3</td><td>110</td></tr>
2467 <tr><td>POP3+SSL</td><td>995</td></tr>
2470 <h2><a id="R13" name="R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call"
2473 <p>Non-fatal signals (such as timers set by fetchmail itself) can
2474 interrupt long-running functions and will then be reported as
2475 "Interrupted system call". These can sometimes be timeouts.</p>
2478 <h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
2479 <h2><a id="H1" name="H1">H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with
2482 <p>Your problem may be with pppd's 'demand' option. We have a
2483 report that fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with
2484 pppd if 'demand' is turned off. We have no idea why this is.</p>
2486 <h2><a id="H2" name="H2">H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM
2489 <p>The symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to
2490 hang after sending the MAIL FROM command</p>
2493 SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>
2496 <p>The hang is actually occuring when sendmail looks up a sender's
2497 address in DNS. The problem isn't in fetchmail but in the
2498 configuration of sendmail. You must enable the 'nodns' and
2499 'nocanonify' features of sendmail.</p>
2501 <p>Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:</p>
2504 <li># cd /etc/mail</li>
2506 <li># cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc</li>
2508 <li>Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
2516 <li>Build a new sendmail.cf
2519 # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
2523 <li>Restart sendmail.</li>
2526 <p>For more details consult the file
2527 /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.</p>
2529 <h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
2532 <p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
2533 but hangs returning:</p>
2536 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
2537 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
2538 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
2539 .......fetchmail: flushed
2540 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
2541 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted
2544 <p>Check and see if you're allowing sendmail connections through
2547 <p>Adding 'sendmail : 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow could solve
2551 <h1>Disappearing mail</h1>
2552 <h2><a id="D1" name="D1">D1. I think I've set up fetchmail
2553 correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.</a></h2>
2555 <p>Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten
2556 about. You should probably remove it.</p>
2558 <p>Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as
2559 root without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it
2560 should; see question <a href="#C1">C1</a>.</p>
2562 <p>Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail
2563 -v and see <a href="#R1">R1</a>.</p>
2565 <p>Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the
2569 user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here
2572 <p>make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.</p>
2574 <h2><a id="D2" name="D2">D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a
2575 dropped connection.</a></h2>
2577 <p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
2578 itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
2579 fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
2580 also truncates long lines at column 1024.)</p>
2582 <p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
2583 whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Better ones will restore it
2584 right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
2585 away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
2587 <p>Good servers are designed to restore the entire queue, including
2588 messages you have deleted. If you have one of these and it flakes out on
2589 you a lot, try setting a small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This
2590 will result in more IP connects to the server, but will mean it actually
2591 executes changes to the queue more often.</p>
2593 <h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
2594 interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
2596 <p>Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when
2597 either (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP
2598 listener, or (b) it gets one of the spam-filter errors (see the
2599 description of the <code>antispam></code> option) from the
2600 listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.</p>
2602 <p>However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
2603 command marks a message 'seen' as soon as the fetch command to get
2604 it is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually
2605 delivered (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25
2606 listener can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the
2607 delivery in mid-message) that 'seen' message can lurk invisibly in
2608 your server mailbox forever.</p>
2610 <p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
2613 <p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org/">IMAP4</a>
2617 <h1>Multidrop-mode problems</h1>
2618 <h2><a id="M1" name="M1">M1. I've declared local names, but all my
2619 multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
2621 <p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
2622 recipient names it parses out of Envelope-header lines (or these are
2623 improperly configured) as
2624 matching a name within the designated domains. To check this, run
2625 fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
2626 of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
2627 the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
2629 <p>These errors usually indicate some kind of configuration
2632 <p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
2633 necessary) and add enough '<code>aka</code>' declarations to cover all
2634 of your mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
2635 take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be uncollected if
2636 it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you don't have listed).</p>
2638 <p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
2639 problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
2641 <h2><a id="M2" name="M2">M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route
2642 to a local domain properly.</a></h2>
2644 <p>A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's
2645 internetwork mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole
2646 domain in a single server mailbox and then routing based on what's
2647 in the To/Cc/Bcc lines.</p>
2649 <p>In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter
2650 to just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use
2651 fetchmail's ETRN or ODMR modes to trigger SMTP sends periodically
2652 (of course, this means you have to poll more frequently than the
2653 mailserver's expiration period). If you can't arrange this, try
2654 setting up a UUCP feed.</p>
2656 <p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
2657 may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
2658 list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
2659 MAILBOXES on the man page, and check what is needed at <a
2660 href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/mail/multidrop">Matthias
2661 Andree's "Requisites for working multidrop
2662 mailboxes"</a>). If you want to try it, the way to do it is
2663 with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
2665 <p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
2668 <p><strong>1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to
2669 invoke multidrop mode.</strong></p>
2671 <p>Many people set a '<code>localdomains</code>' list and then
2672 forget that fetchmail wants to see more than one name (or the
2673 wildcard '*') in a '<code>here</code>' list before it will do
2674 multidrop routing.</p>
2676 <p><strong>2. You may have to set 'no envelope'.</strong></p>
2678 <p>Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address
2679 from a message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it
2680 to avoid losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a
2681 recipient address in the To lines).</p>
2683 <p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
2684 server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
2685 that is useless for rerouting purposes. In this particular case, sell
2686 your ISP a clue. If that does not work, you may have to set
2687 '<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
2688 bamboozled by this, but a missing envelope makes multidrop routing
2691 <p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
2692 multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
2695 <h2><a id="M3" name="M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using
2696 multidrop, and I have a mail loop!</a></h2>
2698 <p>This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the
2699 list expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver
2700 (that is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just
2701 chop the host part off any local addresses in the list.</p>
2703 <p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
2704 <code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
2706 <h2><a id="M4" name="M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
2707 having DNS problems.</strike></a></h2>
2709 <p><em>The answer that used to be here no longer applies to
2712 <h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
2713 message is processed.</a></h2>
2715 <p>Use the '<code>aka</code>' option to pre-declare as many of your
2716 mailserver's DNS names as you can. When an address's host part
2717 matches an aka name, no DNS lookup needs to be done to check
2720 <p>If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS
2721 names, you can use the '<code>no dns</code>' option to prevent
2722 other hostname parts from being looked up at all.</p>
2724 <p>Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to
2725 call DNS on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the
2726 address is valid.</p>
2728 <h2><a id="M6" name="M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work
2729 with majordomo?</a></h2>
2731 <p>In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the
2732 majordomo alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that
2733 the mail it receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user
2734 name. A normal virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the
2735 default mailbox, rather than expansion through majordomo.</p>
2737 <p>Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for
2738 dealing with this case that pairs a run control file like this:</p>
2741 poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
2743 localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2744 user yourISPusername is root * here,
2745 password yourISPpassword fetchall
2748 <p>with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:</p>
2751 #############################################
2752 # virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98 #
2753 #############################################
2755 # domains to treat as direct mapped local domain
2757 CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
2758 ---------------------------
2760 -------------------------
2761 # handle virtual users
2763 R$+ <@ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2764 R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . > $: $1 < @ $j . >
2765 R< @ > $+ $: $1
2766 R< error : $- $+ > $* $#error $@ $1 $: $2
2767 R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ > $: $>97 $1
2770 <p>This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses
2771 of incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to
2772 work. Michael says:</p>
2774 <blockquote>I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the
2775 default ISP user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts +
2776 majordomo on my inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail
2779 <h2><a id="M7" name="M7">M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope
2780 addresses from my Received headers as it should.</a></h2>
2782 <p>It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
2783 sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
2784 envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for
2787 <h3>Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:</h3>
2789 <p>First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
2790 Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
2791 that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
2792 mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.</p>
2794 <p>Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra
2795 Received lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the
2796 optional skip prefix argument of the 'envelope' option; you may
2797 need to say something like '<code>envelope 1 Received</code>' or
2798 '<code>envelope 2 Received</code>'.</p>
2800 <h3>The 'by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:</h3>
2802 <p>When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like</p>
2805 Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
2806 by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
2807 for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700
2810 <p>it checks to see if 'iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your
2811 mailserver before accepting 'ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope
2812 address. This check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or
2813 if you were using 'no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net
2814 as an alias of your server.</p>
2816 <h2><a id="M8" name="M8">M8. Users are getting multiple copies of
2819 <p>It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you
2820 have N users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N
2821 copies, not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box.
2822 Since they are both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail
2823 delivers N copies to each user.</p>
2825 <p>Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
2826 multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID
2827 being identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies
2828 being adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the
2829 case, but the latter condition sometimes fails in a
2830 timing-dependent way if the server was processing multiple incoming
2833 <p>I could eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all
2834 message-IDs received during a poll so far and dropping any message
2835 that matches a seen mail ID. The trouble is that this is an O(N**2)
2836 operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
2839 <p>The real solution however is to make sure that fetchmail can find the
2840 envelope recipient properly, which will reliably prevent this message
2844 <h1>Mangled mail</h1>
2845 <h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
2846 the headers of fetched mail.</a></h2>
2848 <p>What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
2849 mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
2850 something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
2851 <em>deliver</em> program, which sendmail often calls to do local
2852 delivery) is failing to recognize it as a header.</p>
2854 <p>This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is
2855 installing a current version of <em>deliver</em>. If this doesn't
2856 work, try to figure out which other program in your mail path is
2857 inserting the blank line and replace that. If you can't do either
2858 of these things, pick a different MDA (such as maildrop) and
2859 declare it with the '<code>mda</code>' option.</p>
2861 <h2><a id="X2" name="X2">X2. My mail client can't see a Subject
2864 <p>First, see <a href="#X1">X1</a>. This is quite probably the same
2865 problem (X-POP3-Rcpt header or something similar being inserted by
2866 the server and choked on by an old version of
2867 <em>deliver</em>).</p>
2869 <p>The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't
2870 process X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can
2871 suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
2872 RFC822 conformant.</p>
2874 <h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at the start of
2875 line are being split.</a></h2>
2877 <p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
2878 then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
2879 SMTP listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
2882 <p>Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
2883 messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of
2884 the BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and
2885 elsewhere) is broken this way.</p>
2887 <p>You can test this. Declare an mda of 'cat' and send yourself one
2888 piece of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a
2889 split message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more
2892 <p>Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages
2893 either. What's probably happening is either sendmail's local
2894 delivery agent or your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant
2895 and are breaking messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From
2896 headers. You can figure out which by looking at your client-side
2897 mailbox with vi or more. If the message is already split in your
2898 mailbox, your local delivery agent is the problem. If it's not,
2899 your mailreader is the problem.</p>
2901 <p>If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
2902 sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like</p>
2905 Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u
2908 <p>describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the 'E'
2909 option in the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail
2910 turn each dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing
2911 programs further downstream from acting up.</p>
2913 <h2><a id="X4" name="X4">X4.</a> <a id="generic_mangling"
2914 name="generic_mangling">My mail is being mangled in a new and
2915 different way</a></h2>
2917 <p>The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing
2918 the mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail
2919 that are actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so
2920 please go through this diagnostic sequence before sending us a
2923 <p>There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the
2924 order they pass your mail:</p>
2927 <li>Programs upstream of your server mailbox.</li>
2929 <li>The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.</li>
2931 <li>The fetchmail program itself.</li>
2933 <li>Your local sendmail.</li>
2935 <li>Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
2936 specified by <code>mda</code>.</li>
2939 <p>Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it
2940 exposes pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your
2941 downstream software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need
2942 to pin down exactly where the message is being garbled in order to
2943 deduce what is actually going on.</p>
2945 <p>The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and
2946 retrieve it with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or
2947 by running with the equivalent command-line options):</p>
2950 mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall
2953 <p>This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except
2954 for (a) the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b)
2955 header address changes due to <code>rewrite</code>, and (c) any
2956 end-of-line changes due to the <code>forcecr</code> and
2957 <code>stripcr</code> options. MBOX will in fact contain what
2958 programs downstream of fetchmail see.</p>
2960 <p>The most common causes of mangling are bugs and
2961 misconfigurations in those downstream programs. If MBOX looks
2962 unmangled, you will know that is what is going on and that it is
2963 not fetchmail's problem. Take a look at the other FAQ items in this
2964 section for possible clues about how to fix your problem.</p>
2966 <p>If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with
2967 your actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified
2968 <code>keep</code>, so the server copy would not be deleted. If your
2969 server mailbox looks mangled, programs upstream of your server
2970 mailbox are at fault. Unfortunately there is probably little you
2971 can do about this aside from complaining to your site postmaster,
2972 and nothing at all fetchmail can do about it!</p>
2974 <p>More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that
2975 case either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling.
2976 To determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and
2977 simulate a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard
2978 (both POP3 and IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols)
2979 but requires some attention to detail. You should be able to use a
2980 fetchmail -v log as a model for a session, but remember that the
2981 "*" in your LOGIN or PASS command dump has to be replaced with your
2982 actual password.</p>
2984 <p>The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
2985 exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then
2986 your server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
2987 mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
2988 servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us
2989 a transcript of the session including the mangling <em>and the
2990 server's initial greeting line</em>. Please tell us anything else
2991 you think might be useful about the server, like the server host's
2992 operating system.</p>
2994 <p>If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
2995 congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
2996 pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it.
2997 Please include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail
2998 simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
2999 on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
3001 <h2><a id="X5" name="X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
3002 fetching too much!</strike></a></h2>
3004 <p><em>The information that used to be here pertained to fetchmail 4.4.7 or
3005 older, which should not be used. Use a recent fetchmail version.</em></p>
3007 <h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
3008 or mangled.</a></h2>
3010 <p>Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
3011 that attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message as
3012 an uninterpreted byte stream and passes it through without alteration.
3013 If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it is because
3014 your mailserver is not sending them to you.</p>
3016 <p>The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works.
3017 If its operating system makes this difficult, you should replace its
3018 operating system with one that works. Windows- and NT-based POP servers
3019 seem especially prone to mangle attachments. If you are running one
3020 of these, replacing your server with a Unix machine is probably the
3021 only effective solution.</p>
3023 <p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
3024 Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
3025 attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
3028 <p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
3029 see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
3030 you're having this problem. The <a
3031 href="http://world.std.com/~damned/software.html">TNEF</a> utility may
3034 <p>The Mail Max POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP
3035 servers are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading
3038 <p>We've also had a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the
3039 MIME type of messages. In particular, it seems to modify MIME
3040 headers of type application/pdf, mangling the type to
3041 application/octet-stream. It may corrupt other MIME types as
3044 <p>The IMAP service of Lotus Domino has a known bug in the way it
3045 generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino
3046 5.0.2b). It's a subtle one that doesn't show up when Netscape
3047 Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
3048 message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
3049 RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
3050 generates different Boundary tags for each part, e.g. one tag is
3051 declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
3052 the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
3053 rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
3054 you can find a workaround at contrib/domino.)</p>
3056 <p>Rob Funk explains: Unfortunately there also remain many mail
3057 user agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big
3058 offender is Sun MailTool attachments, which are formatted enough
3059 like MIME that some programs could get confused; these are
3060 generated by the mailtool and dtmail programs (the mail programs in
3061 Sun's OpenWindows and CDE environments).</p>
3063 <p>One solution to problems related to misformatted MIME
3064 attachments is the <a
3065 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/">emil</a>
3067 href="ftp://ftp.uu.se/pub/unix/networking/mail/emil/TUTORIAL.html">tutorial</a>
3068 file at that site for details on emil. It is useful for converting
3069 character sets, attachment encodings, and attachment formats. At
3070 this writing, emil does not appear to have been maintained since a
3071 patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in late 1997, but it is still
3074 <p>One good way of using emil is from within procmail. You can have
3075 procmail look for signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
3076 those messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be
3077 able to fix the problem, in which case the message is
3080 <p>A possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using
3085 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
3086 * 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
3087 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
3088 * 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
3090 LOG="Converting $MATCH
3093 | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
3094 | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
3098 <p>The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail
3099 that if any one of the four listed expressions is found in the
3100 message, the total condition is considered true, and the message
3101 gets passed into emil. These four subconditions check whether the
3102 message has a Sun attachment, a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded
3103 attachment; there are others that could be added to check these
3104 things better and to check other relevant conditions. The "LOG="
3105 line writes a line into the procmail log; the lone double-quote
3106 beginning the following line makes sure the log entry gets an
3107 end-of-line character. The call to gawk (GNU awk) is for fixing
3108 end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes leaves those in the
3109 format of the originating machine; it could probably be replaced
3110 with a sed subsitution.</p>
3112 <p>The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:</p>
3115 <li>BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments</li>
3117 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)</li>
3119 <li>Base64 Encoding for binary attachments</li>
3121 <li>iso-8859-1 character set for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
3122 convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)</li>
3124 <li>Quoted-Printable encoding for headers</li>
3126 <li>MIME attachment format</li>
3129 <p>Most of these (the primary exceptions being the character set
3130 and the Apple binary format) are as they should be for good
3131 internet interoperability.</p>
3133 <p>Some mail servers (Lotus Domino is a suspect here) mangle
3134 Sun-formatted messages, so the conversion to MIME needs to happen
3135 before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world
3136 of Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending
3137 attachments (it doesn't understand MIME anyway, and most of the
3138 world doesn't understand its attachments, so it really shouldn't be
3139 used at all), and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than
3140 mailtool's format.</p>
3142 <h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
3145 <p>Fetchmail doesn't know anything about mail attachments and doesn't
3146 treat them any differently from plain message data.</p>
3148 <p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
3149 network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
3150 TCP/IP packets that attachments tend to turn into. You can test
3151 this theory by trying to download the offending message through a
3152 webmail account; using HTTP for the message tends to simulate
3153 large-packet stress rather well, and you will probably find that
3154 the messages that seem to be choking fetchmail will make your HTTP
3155 download speed drop to zero.</p>
3157 <p>This problem can be caused by subtle bugs in the
3158 packet-reassembly layer of your TCP/IP stack; these often don't
3159 manifest at normal packet sizes. It may also be caused by
3160 malfunctioning path-MTU discovery on the mailserver. Or, if there's
3161 a modem in the link, it may be because the attachment contains the
3162 Hayes mode escape "+++".</p>
3164 <h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
3167 <p>Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
3168 IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100 %.
3169 Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
3170 SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
3171 the message end.</p>
3173 <p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
3174 mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
3177 <ol><li>Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
3178 message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
3179 e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</li>
3181 <li>The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
3182 the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
3183 which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
3184 part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
3185 "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
3186 at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
3189 <li>Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
3190 IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
3191 the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
3192 the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
3199 <p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p></li>
3201 <li>Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
3202 stated message size because Microsoft Exchange goofs it up.</li>
3204 <li>As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
3205 it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
3206 on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</li>
3209 <p>There is no fix for this.</p>
3211 <h2><a id="X9" name="X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
3212 with Domino IMAP</a></h2>
3214 <p>Domino 6 IMAP was found by Anthony Kim in February 2006 to
3215 erroneously omit the "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header in messages
3216 downloaded through IMAP, causing messages to display improperly. This
3217 happened with Domino's incoming mail format configured to "Prefers
3218 MIME". Solution: switch Domino to "Keep in Sender's format".</p>
3221 href="http://lists.ccil.org/pipermail/fetchmail-friends/2006-March/010015.html">Anthony
3225 <h2><a id="X10" name="X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial
3228 <p>Fetchmail is sometimes reported to deliver partial messages. This
3229 is usually related to network outages that occur while fetchmail is
3230 downloading a message body. In such cases, fetchmail has downloaded a
3231 complete header, so your header will be intact. The message body will be
3232 truncated, and fetchmail will later attempt to redownload the
3233 message (providing the server is standards conformant).</p>
3235 <p>The reason for the truncation is that fetchmail streams the body
3236 directly from the POP3/IMAP server into the SMTP/LMTP server or MDA (in
3237 order to save memory), so fetchmail has already written a part of the
3238 message before it notices it will be incomplete, and fetchmail cannot
3239 abort a transaction it has started, and it's unclear if it ever will be
3240 able to, because this is not standardized and the outcome will depend on
3241 the receiving software (be it SMTP/LMTP or MDA).</p>
3244 <h1>Other problems</h1>
3245 <h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
3246 the logfile doesn't exist.</a></h2>
3248 <p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
3249 for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
3250 the log file, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts.
3251 To get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
3252 (this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it already
3255 <h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message,
3256 the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
3258 <p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
3259 which Mozilla and other clients don't do; the announcement of
3260 new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
3261 be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
3267 <p>to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command</p>
3273 <p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
3274 doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
3275 /etc/inetd.conf file and reload (or restart) inetd.</p>
3277 <p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
3290 to solve the problem system-wide.
3292 <h2><a id="O3" name="O3">O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file
3293 every poll cycle?</a></h2>
3295 <p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
3296 your rc file and restart, reading it. Note that this causes troubles if
3297 you need to provide a password via the console, unless you're running in
3298 --nodetach mode.</p>
3300 <h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
3301 when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
3303 <p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
3304 until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
3305 fix this, but there is a workaround: use the --expunge option with a
3306 reasonably low figure that works for you. Try 10 for a start.</p>
3308 <p>IMAP is less susceptible to this problem, because the "deleted"
3309 message marks are persistent, but they aren't in POP3. Note that the
3310 --expunge default for IMAP is different than the default for POP3.</p>
3312 <p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
3313 between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
3314 interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
3315 the next time you complete a successful query.</p>
3317 <h2><a id="O5" name="O5">O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with
3318 my name, not the real From address?</a></h2>
3320 <p>Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the
3321 sending SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that
3324 <p>Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL
3325 FROM address naming a different host than the originating site for
3326 your connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to
3327 help prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site.
3328 (RFC 1123 says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)</p>
3330 <p>Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
3331 localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf
3332 on any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!</p>
3334 <p>Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall
3335 back to the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky,
3336 the log will look right.</p>
3338 <h2><a id="O6" name="O6">O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or
3339 hangs near the start of each poll cycle.</a></h2>
3341 <p>Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and
3342 also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
3344 <p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
3345 to fail and time out. Check your <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>,
3346 <code>/etc/host.conf</code>, <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> (if you
3347 have the latter two) and you <code>/etc/hosts</code> files. Make sure
3348 your hostname and fully-qualified domain name are both in
3349 <code>/etc/hosts</code>, and that hosts is looked at before DNS is
3350 queried. You probably also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the
3353 <p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
3354 with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
3356 <p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
3357 help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
3358 Switching to a faster MTA like <a
3359 href="http://www.postfix.org/">Postfix</a> might help.</p>
3361 <h2><a id="O7" name="O7">O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in
3362 date-sorted order?</a></h2>
3364 <p>Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail
3367 <p>Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the
3368 order that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything
3369 about this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.</p>
3371 <p>In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to
3372 sort messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics
3373 of fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and
3374 transparent a pipe as possible, and (b) to <em>hide</em>, rather
3375 than emphasize, the differences between the remote-fetch protocols
3378 <p>Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.</p>
3380 <h2><a id="O8" name="O8">O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor
3381 option working?</a></h2>
3383 <p>There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse
3384 fetchmail. If you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd
3385 has an idle timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
3386 lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
3387 Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
3388 fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its
3389 own delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever
3390 reaching its inactivity timeout.</p>
3392 <h2><a id="O9" name="O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the
3393 same messages over and over?</a></h2>
3395 <p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
3396 <cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
3397 turn one of them off - which one, depends on why they have been set in
3398 the first place, and to a lesser degree on the upstream server.</p>
3400 <p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
3401 your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
3402 many, especially most POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your
3403 fetchmail is able to retrieve the messages, but because the mailbox
3404 is write-locked by the other instance yours can neither mark
3405 messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
3406 for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
3408 <h2><a id="O10" name="O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my
3409 messages the same?</strike></a></h2>
3411 <p><em>The answer that used to be here made no sense and was dropped.</em></p>
3413 <h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
3414 immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
3416 <p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.
3417 Because some servers like to drop the connection after that probe,
3418 fetchmail will re-poll immediately with this probe defeated.</p>
3420 <p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
3421 get the message only once per run.</p>
3423 <p>If you set an authentication method explicitly (say, with
3424 <code>auth password</code>), you will never get the message.</p>
3426 <h2><a name="O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a></h2>
3428 <p>This is a feature, not a bug.</p>
3430 <p>Any 4xx response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
3431 This means that the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
3432 failures are normally transient errors as a mail should not get
3433 rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.</p>
3435 <p>A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).</p>
3437 <p>You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
3438 not keen on checking the sender addresses. This problem typically
3439 occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
3440 your local server is.</p>
3442 <p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>, which is not
3443 recommended though, as it may cause mail loss.</p>
3445 <p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
3448 <p>All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.</p>
3450 <h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
3452 <p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
3453 does something like "date >> $HOME/fetchmail.log".</p>
3455 <h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
3458 <p>Use <code>--limitflush</code> (available since release 6.3.0) to
3459 delete oversized mails along with the <code>--limit</code> option. If
3460 you are already having <code>flush</code> in your rcfile to delete
3461 oversized mails, <em>replace</em> it with <code>limitflush</code> to
3462 avoid losing mails unintentionally.</p>
3464 <p>The <code>--flush</code> option is primarily designed to delete
3465 mails which have been read/downloaded but not deleted yet. This option
3466 cannot be overloaded to delete oversized mails as it cannot be guessed
3467 whether the user wants to delete only read/downloaded mails or only
3468 oversized mails or both when a user specifies both
3469 <code>--limit</code> and <code>--flush</code>. Hence, a separate
3470 <code>--limitflush</code> has been added to resolve the ambiguity.</p>
3472 <h2><a name="O15">O15. Fetchmail always retains the first message in the
3475 <p>This happens when fetchmail sees an "X-IMAP:" header in the very
3476 first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
3477 the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
3478 message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
3479 is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
3480 aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
3485 From MAILER-DAEMON Wed Nov 23 11:38:42 2005
3486 Date: 23 Nov 2005 11:38:42 +0100
3487 From: Mail System Internal Data <MAILER-DAEMON@imap.example.org>
3488 Subject: DON'T DELETE THIS MESSAGE -- FOLDER INTERNAL DATA
3489 Message-ID: <1132742322@imap.example.org>
3490 X-IMAP: 1132742306 0000000001
3493 This text is part of the internal format of your mail folder, and is not
3494 a real message. It is created automatically by the mail system software.
3495 If deleted, important folder data will be lost, and it will be re-created
3496 with the data reset to initial values.
3500 <p>As this message does not contain useful information, fetchmail is not
3501 retrieving it. And deleting it might slow down the server if you are
3502 keeping messages on the server, and the server would recreate it
3503 anyways, that's why fetchmail does not bother to delete it either.</p>
3505 <h2><a name="O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
3506 ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter format?</a></h2>
3508 <p>All the world uses ISO-216:1975 "A4" paper except for North America.
3509 Using A4 format reaches far more people than (formerly known as DIN A4,
3510 from DIN 476) format. Besides that, A4 paper <em>is</em> available in North
3512 For further information on the Letter-vs-A4 story, see:</p>
3513 <ul><li><a href="http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/iso-paper.html">Markus
3514 Kuhn: "International standard paper sizes"</a></li>
3516 href="http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/">Brian
3517 Forte: "A4 vs US Letter"</a></li></ul>
3519 <p>Offering the document formatted for two different paper sizes would
3520 bloat the package beyond reason, and formatting in a way that fits A4
3521 and Letter paper formats would be a waste of paper in most parts of the
3522 world. For that reason, fetchmail only ships with an A4 formatted PDF
3525 <p>To create a letter-sized PDF, install <a
3526 href="http://www.htmldoc.org/">HTMLDOC</a>, edit
3527 <code>fetchmail-FAQ.book</code> in the source directory with your
3528 favorite text editor, replace <samp>--size A4</samp> by <samp>--size
3529 letter</samp>, and type:
3532 make fetchmail-FAQ.pdf
3535 <h2><a name="O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
3536 in MSG_PEEK."</a></h2>
3537 <p>That's in fact a bug in Linux kernels around the late 2.6.2X versions,
3538 rather than fetchmail. Fetchmail has no race bugs around MSG_PEEK,
3539 as of version 6.3.9. The message can safely be ignored.</p>
3542 <table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
3544 <td width="30%">Back to <a href="index.html">Fetchmail Home
3546 <td width="30%" align="right">$Date$</td>
3551 <address>Eric S. Raymond <a
3552 href="mailto:esr@thyrsus.com"><esr@thyrsus.com></a><br />
3553 Matthias Andree</address>