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18 <td align="right"><!-- update date -->2010-05-06</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>SSL issues after upgrade to 6.3.16/6.3.17 or OpenSSL 1.0.0?</h1>
46 <p>If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
47 library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run <kbd>c_rehash
48 /path/to/certs</kbd>, where the last part is whatever argument
49 you give to fetchmail's <code>sslcertpath</code> option. Details:
51 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#R14">see fetchmail's FAQ item
54 <h1>NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.17 RELEASE</h1>
56 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">fetchmail-6.3.17
57 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
58 regression of the rcfile parser from 6.3.0, a security bug in debug
59 output that can cause memory exhaustion and abort, and improves SSL
60 usability. It is a recommended update for all users. <a
61 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=17512">Click
62 here to see the change details.</a>
66 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
67 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
68 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
71 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
72 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
73 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
77 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
79 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
80 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
81 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
82 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
83 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
84 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
85 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
87 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
88 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
89 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
90 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
91 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
93 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
94 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
95 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
96 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
97 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
98 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
100 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
101 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
102 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
103 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
104 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
106 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
107 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
108 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
109 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
111 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
112 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
113 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
114 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
116 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
117 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
118 Pentium under Linux.</p>
120 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
121 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
124 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
126 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
127 about what fetchmail does.</p>
129 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
132 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
133 troubleshooting help.</p>
135 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
136 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
138 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
139 of known problems and requested features.</p>
141 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
142 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
143 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
145 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
146 page</a> for more, including <a
147 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
149 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
151 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
152 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
153 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
154 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
157 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
158 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
159 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
160 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
162 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
163 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
164 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
165 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
166 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
167 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
168 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
170 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
171 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
172 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
173 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
174 adding IMAP support.</p>
175 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
176 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
177 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
178 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
179 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
180 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
181 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
183 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
185 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
186 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
188 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
189 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
190 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
191 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
192 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
194 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
195 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
196 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
197 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
198 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
200 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
202 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
203 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
204 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
205 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
207 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
208 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
209 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
211 <h1>Related works</h1>
213 <h2>Similar software</h2>
215 <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>.
217 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
218 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
219 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
220 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
221 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
222 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
225 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
227 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
229 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
230 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
231 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
232 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
233 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
234 the contents of headers.</p>
237 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
238 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
239 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
242 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
243 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
244 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
245 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
248 <p>There's a program called
249 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
250 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
251 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
253 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
254 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
255 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
256 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
257 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
258 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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