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18 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2010-03-28</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</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 6.3.15 RELEASE</h1>
47 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">fetchmail-6.3.15
48 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a security
49 issue (see below) and some IMAP client bugs. Notably, IMAP2 functionality
50 has been restored and servers that refuse the SEARCH command are now
53 It is a recommended update for all users. <a
54 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=17380">Click
55 here to see the change details.</a>
59 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
60 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
61 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
64 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
65 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
66 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
70 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
72 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
73 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
74 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
75 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
76 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
77 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
78 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
80 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
81 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
82 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
83 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
84 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
86 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
87 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
88 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
89 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
90 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
91 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
93 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
94 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
95 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
96 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
97 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
99 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
100 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
101 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
102 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
104 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
105 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
106 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
107 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
109 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
110 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
111 Pentium under Linux.</p>
113 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
114 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
117 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
119 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
120 about what fetchmail does.</p>
122 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
125 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
126 troubleshooting help.</p>
128 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
129 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
131 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
132 of known problems and requested features.</p>
134 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
135 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
136 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
138 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
139 page</a> for more, including <a
140 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
142 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
144 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
145 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
146 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
147 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
150 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
151 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
152 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
153 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
155 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
156 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
157 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
158 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
159 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
160 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
161 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
163 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
164 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
165 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
166 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
167 adding IMAP support.</p>
168 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
169 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
170 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
171 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
172 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
173 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
174 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
176 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
178 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
179 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
181 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
182 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
183 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
184 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
185 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
187 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
188 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
189 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
190 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
191 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
193 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
195 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
196 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
197 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
198 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
200 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
201 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
202 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
204 <h1>Related works</h1>
206 <h2>Similar software</h2>
208 <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>.
210 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
211 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
212 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
213 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
214 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
215 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
218 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
220 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
222 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
223 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
224 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
225 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
226 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
227 the contents of headers.</p>
230 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
231 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
232 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
235 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
236 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
237 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
238 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
241 <p>There's a program called
242 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
243 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
244 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
246 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
247 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
248 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
249 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
250 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
251 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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