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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>NEWS: IMAP7 in mailbox names (developer document)</h1>
46 <p>There is a <a href="Mailbox-Names-UTF7.html">new document about
47 mailbox name encoding in IMAP,</a>
48 an invited contribution by Mark Crispin. It applies to all IMAP
49 clients and servers and is not limited to fetchmail, and arose after
50 a discussion on the getmail mailing list. Note that as of
51 2010-05-25, neither fetchmail nor getmail currently supports this
52 directly; for the nonce, you need to manually encode the mailbox
53 name in UTF-7 for both applications.</p>
55 <h1>SSL issues after upgrade to 6.3.16/6.3.17 or OpenSSL 1.0.0?</h1>
56 <p>If your fetchmail upgrade entails an upgrade of the OpenSSL
57 library to 1.0.0, remember to re-run <kbd>c_rehash
58 /path/to/certs</kbd>, where the last part is whatever argument
59 you give to fetchmail's <code>sslcertpath</code> option. Details:
61 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#R14">see fetchmail's FAQ item
64 <h1>NEWS: FETCHMAIL 6.3.17 RELEASE</h1>
66 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">fetchmail-6.3.17
67 has been released (this is the download link),</a> fixing a
68 regression of the rcfile parser from 6.3.0, a security bug in debug
69 output that can cause memory exhaustion and abort, and improves SSL
70 usability. It is a recommended update for all users. <a
71 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/shownotes.php?group_id=1824&release_id=17512">Click
72 here to see the change details.</a>
76 <div style="background-color:#ffe0c0;color:#000000;font-size:85%"> <h1>SECURITY ALERTS</h1>
77 <p>These have been moved <a href="security.html">to a separate
78 page (click here for security information)</a> to unclutter the
81 <p style="font-size:100%"><strong>Please <a
82 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">update
83 to the newest fetchmail version</a>.</strong></p>
87 <h1>What fetchmail does:</h1>
89 <p>Fetchmail is a full-featured, robust, well-documented
90 remote-mail retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over
91 on-demand TCP/IP links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It supports
92 every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3,
93 RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of <a
94 href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even
95 support IPv6 and IPSEC.</p>
97 <p>Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via
98 SMTP, so it can then be read by normal mail user agents such as <a
99 href="http://www.mutt.org/">mutt</a>, elm(1) or BSD Mail.
100 It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing
101 facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.</p>
103 <p>Fetchmail offers better protection against password-sniffing than any
104 other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve
105 RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods
106 including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be
107 configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with <a
108 href="http://www.openssh.com/">ssh, the Secure Shell</a>.</p>
110 <p>Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS
111 domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and
112 SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really
113 recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header
114 information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)</p>
116 <p>Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon
117 at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval,
118 it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is
119 not a full-time "push" connection.</p>
121 <p>Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or
122 use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the
123 fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf
124 versions 1.16r8 and later.</p>
126 <p>Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard
127 features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in 196K of core on a
128 Pentium under Linux.</p>
130 <p>Fetchmail is <a href="http://www.opensource.org">open-source</a>
131 and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">free
134 <h1>Where to find out more about fetchmail:</h1>
136 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-features.html">Fetchmail Feature List</a> for more
137 about what fetchmail does.</p>
139 <p>See the on-line <a href="fetchmail-man.html">manual page</a> for
142 <p>See the <a href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">HTML Fetchmail FAQ</a> for
143 troubleshooting help.</p>
145 <p>See the <a href="design-notes.html">Fetchmail Design Notes</a>
146 for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.</p>
148 <p>See the project's <a href="todo.html">To-Do list</a> for indications
149 of known problems and requested features.</p>
151 <p>The developers use <a href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> for revision
152 control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version,
153 find the instructions at <a href="http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail">http://gitorious.org/fetchmail/fetchmail</a>.</p>
155 <p>See the <a href="http://developer.berlios.de/projects/fetchmail/">project
156 page</a> for more, including <a
157 href="http://developer.berlios.de/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1824">downloads</a>.</p>
159 <h1>Getting help with fetchmail:</h1>
161 <p>Before submitting a question anywhere, <strong>please read the <a
162 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html">FAQ</a></strong> (especially item <a
163 href="fetchmail-FAQ.html#G3">G3</a> on how to report problems). We tend to get
164 the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like
167 <p>There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
168 of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at <a
169 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">
170 fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de</a>.
172 fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
173 improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at <a
174 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">
175 fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de</a>.
176 <br>Finally, there is an announcements-only list, <a
177 href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">
178 fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de</a>.</p>
180 <h1>Maintainer History</h1>
181 <p>Fetchmail originated as a program called <i>popclient</i>, written
182 by Carl Harris. In 1996, <a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric
183 S. Raymond</a> took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after
184 adding IMAP support.</p>
185 <p>In 2004 a new team took over, led by <a
186 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/rfunk/">Rob Funk</a>, <a
187 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/bob/">Graham Wilson</a>, and <a
188 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/m-a/">Matthias Andree</a>. Since then,
189 Graham Wilson has retreated, and <a
190 href="http://developer.berlios.de/users/shetye/">Sunil Shetye</a> has
191 contributed several important pieces of code.</p>
193 <h1>You can help improve fetchmail:</h1>
195 <p>We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code,
196 you can help fetchmail improve.</p>
198 <p><strong>If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be
199 able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site.
200 Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a
201 mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per
202 se -- what we're collecting is different <em>kinds of servers</em>.</strong></p>
204 <p>Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped
205 test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to
206 retrieve it. Please take a look at the <a href="testservers.html">
207 list of test servers</a>. If you can lend us an account on a kind
208 of server that is <em>not</em> already on this list, please do.</p>
210 <h1>Where you can use fetchmail:</h1>
212 <p>The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
213 extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It
214 should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only
215 POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).</p>
217 <p>Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers.
218 However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS,
219 AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well. There is a CygWin port.</p>
221 <h1>Related works</h1>
223 <h2>Similar software</h2>
225 <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>.
227 <p><strong>getmail:</strong> When fetchmail's development was
228 stalled before the latest team took over, <a
229 href="http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/">Charles Cazabon's getmail</a> came
230 along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
231 fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
232 instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
235 <p><strong>animail:</strong> Another contender with integrated filtering is <a href="http://juanjoalvarez.net/animaileng">Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail</a>.</p>
237 <h2>Complementary and extension software</h2>
239 <p>Jochen Hayek is developing a set of
240 <a href="http://www.b.shuttle.de/hayek/JHimap_utils/">
241 IMAP tools in Python</a> that read your .fetchmailrc file and are
242 designed to work with fetchmail. Jochen's tools can report selected
243 header lines, or move incoming messages to named mailboxes based on
244 the contents of headers.</p>
247 <p>Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called
248 <a href="http://blogs.linux.ie/xeer/install-sendmail/">install-sendmail</a>
249 that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together.</p>
252 <p>Peter Hawkins has written a script called <a
253 href="http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php">gotmail</a> that
254 can retrieve Hotmail. Another script, <a
255 href="http://yosucker.sourceforge.net">yosucker</a>, can retrieve
258 <p>There's a program called
259 <a href="http://mailfilter.sourceforge.net/">mailfilter</a> which can be used
260 to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
261 <code>preconnect</code> directive.</p>
263 <p>A hacker identifying himself simply as 'Steines' has written a
264 filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes
265 receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also
266 rewrites the domain-part of addresses if the offical domain is
267 different from the local domain. You can find it <a
268 href="http://www.steines.com/mailf/">here</a>.</p>
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