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18 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2012-12-23</td>
25 <a href="index.html" title="Main">Main</a><br>
26 <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Features</a><br>
27 <a href="fetchmail-man.html">Manual</a><br>
28 <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html" title="Fetchmail FAQ">FAQ</a><br>
29 <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.pdf" title="Fetchmail FAQ as PDF">FAQ (PDF)</a><br>
30 <a href="design-notes.html">Design Notes</a><br>
31 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">Download</a><br>
32 <a href="security.html">Security/Errata</a><br>
33 <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail/">Development</a><br>
34 <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">Project Page</a><br>
40 <img src="bighand.png" width="100" height="71" alt="logo: a hand presenting an envelope" align="right">
44 <div style="background-color:#c0ffc0;color:#000000;">
45 <h1>NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.24 RELEASE</h1>
47 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824&release_id=19227">fetchmail-6.3.24
48 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
49 minor regression and a memory leak.
50 <br>It is a recommended update for all users and distributors. <a
51 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=19227">Click
52 here to see the change details.</a> Note that 6.3.22 fixed
53 security bugs, and is the oldest version that should be used.
56 <h1>SSL issues after upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0?</h1>
57 <p>If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
58 library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run <kbd>c_rehash
59 /path/to/certs</kbd>, where the last part is whatever argument
60 you give to fetchmail's <code>sslcertpath</code> option. Details:
62 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#R14">see fetchmail's FAQ item
67 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
68 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
69 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
72 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
73 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
74 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
78 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
80 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
81 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
82 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
83 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
84 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
85 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
86 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
88 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
89 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
90 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
91 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
92 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
94 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
95 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
96 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
97 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
98 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
99 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
101 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
102 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
103 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
104 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
105 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
107 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
108 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
109 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
110 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
112 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
113 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
114 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
115 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
117 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
118 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
119 Pentium under Linux.</p>
121 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
122 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
125 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
127 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
128 about what fetchmail does.</p>
130 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
133 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
134 troubleshooting help.</p>
136 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
137 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
139 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
140 of known problems and requested features.</p>
142 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
143 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
144 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
146 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
147 page</a> for more, including <a
148 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
150 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
152 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
153 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
154 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
155 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
158 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
159 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
160 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
161 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
163 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
164 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
165 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
166 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
167 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
168 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
169 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
171 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
172 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
173 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
174 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
175 adding IMAP support.</p>
176 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
177 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
178 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
179 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
180 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
181 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
182 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
184 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
186 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
187 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
189 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
190 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
191 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
192 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
193 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
195 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
196 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
197 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
198 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
199 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
201 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
203 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
204 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
205 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
206 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
208 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
209 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
210 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
212 <h1>Related works</h1>
214 <h2>Similar software</h2>
216 <p><strong>fdm:</strong> A recently appeared software package that integrates basic filtering is <a href="http://fdm.sourceforge.net/">Nicholas Marriott's fdm</a>.
218 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
219 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
220 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
221 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
222 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
223 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
226 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
228 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
230 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
231 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
232 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
233 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
234 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
235 the contents of headers.</p>
238 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
239 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
240 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
243 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
244 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
245 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
246 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
249 <p>There's a program called
250 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
251 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
252 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
254 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
255 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
256 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
257 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
258 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
259 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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