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18 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2010-12-10</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 6.3.19 RELEASE</h1>
47 href="fetchmail-EN-2010-03.txt">an erratum notice was issued</a>
48 to document important fixes made in the 6.3.18 release.
49 Distributors are advised to upgrade their packages to
50 6.3.19 (which fixes a few more bugs than 6.3.18 did).</p>
52 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">fetchmail-6.3.19
53 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
54 Yahoo incompatibility (that was fetchmail's fault), improves
55 configuration for multidrop settings, restores --antispam function
56 on the command line, allows forcing SSL/TLS/STARTTLS negotiation,
57 and reduces GSSAPI verbose/debug chatter in syslog.
58 <br>It is a recommended update for all users and
60 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=18137">Click
61 here to see the change details.</a>
64 <h1>UTF7 in mailbox names (developer document)</h1>
65 <p>There is a <a href="Mailbox-Names-UTF7.html">new document about
66 mailbox name encoding in IMAP,</a>
67 an invited contribution by Mark Crispin. It applies to all IMAP
68 clients and servers and is not limited to fetchmail, and arose after
69 a discussion on the getmail mailing list. Note that as of
70 2010-05-25, neither fetchmail nor getmail currently supports this
71 directly; for the nonce, you need to manually encode the mailbox
72 name in UTF-7 for both applications.</p>
74 <h1>SSL issues after upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0?</h1>
75 <p>If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
76 library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run <kbd>c_rehash
77 /path/to/certs</kbd>, where the last part is whatever argument
78 you give to fetchmail's <code>sslcertpath</code> option. Details:
80 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#R14">see fetchmail's FAQ item
85 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
86 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
87 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
90 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
91 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
92 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
96 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
98 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
99 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
100 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
101 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
102 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
103 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
104 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
106 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
107 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
108 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
109 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
110 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
112 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
113 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
114 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
115 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
116 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
117 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
119 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
120 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
121 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
122 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
123 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
125 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
126 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
127 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
128 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
130 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
131 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
132 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
133 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
135 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
136 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
137 Pentium under Linux.</p>
139 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
140 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
143 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
145 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
146 about what fetchmail does.</p>
148 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
151 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
152 troubleshooting help.</p>
154 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
155 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
157 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
158 of known problems and requested features.</p>
160 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
161 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
162 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
164 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
165 page</a> for more, including <a
166 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
168 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
170 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
171 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
172 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
173 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
176 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
177 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
178 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
179 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
181 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
182 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
183 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
184 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
185 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
186 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
187 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
189 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
190 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
191 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
192 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
193 adding IMAP support.</p>
194 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
195 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
196 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
197 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
198 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
199 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
200 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
202 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
204 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
205 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
207 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
208 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
209 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
210 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
211 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
213 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
214 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
215 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
216 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
217 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
219 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
221 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
222 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
223 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
224 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
226 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
227 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
228 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
230 <h1>Related works</h1>
232 <h2>Similar software</h2>
234 <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>.
236 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
237 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
238 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
239 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
240 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
241 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
244 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
246 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
248 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
249 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
250 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
251 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
252 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
253 the contents of headers.</p>
256 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
257 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
258 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
261 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
262 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
263 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
264 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
267 <p>There's a program called
268 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
269 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
270 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
272 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
273 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
274 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
275 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
276 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
277 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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