- README for popclient 3.0
+fetchmail README
+================
-popclient is a full-featured, robust, well-documented POP2, POP3, APOP,
-and IMAP client originally developed by Carl Harris <ceharris@mal.com> and
-now maintained by Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>.
+Introduction
+------------
-You can find the latest version of popclient from Eric's home page
+Fetchmail is a free, full-featured, robust, well-documented remote mail
+retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP
+links (such as SLIP or PPP connections). It retrieves mail from remote mail
+servers and forwards it to your local (client) machine's delivery system, so it
+can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as mutt(1), elm(1) or
+Mail(1).
- http://www.ccil.org/~esr
+Fetchmail supports all standard mail-retrieval protocols in use on the
+Internet: POP3 (including some variants such as RPOP, APOP, KPOP), IMAP4rev1
+(also IMAP4, IMAP2bis), POP2, IMAP4, ETRN, and ODMR. On the output side,
+fetchmail supports ESMTP/SMTP, LMTP, and invocation of a local delivery agent.
-Features of POP include:
+Fetchmail also fully supports authentication via GSSAPI, Kerberos 4 and 5,
+RFC1938 one-time passwords, Compuserve's POP3 with RPA, Microsoft's NTLM, Demon
+Internet's SDPS, or CRAM-MD5 authentication a la RFC2195.
- * POP2, POP3, APOP and IMAP support with auto-probing for a server
- on the host if no protocol is specified.
+Fetchmail supports end-to-end encryption with OpenSSL, do read README.SSL for
+details on fetchmail's configuration and README.SSL-SERVER for server-side
+requirements. NOTE! To be compatible with earlier releases, fetchmail 6.3's
+default behaviour is more relaxed than dictated by the standard - add options
+such as --sslcertck to tighten certificate checking.
- * Easy configuration via command line or free-format .poprc file.
+Portability
+-----------
- * Daemon mode -- popmail can be run in background to poll
- one or more hosts at a specified interval.
+The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been extensively
+tested under the BSD variants, AIX, HP-UX versions 9 and 10, SunOS, Solaris,
+NEXTSTEP, OSF 3.2, IRIX, and Rhapsody.
- * Delivery via either file-append with mandatory locking or an
- MDA you specify, or via SMTP to the client machine's port 25.
+It should be readily portable to other Unix variants and Unix-like operating
+systems (it uses GNU autoconf). It has been ported to Cygwin, LynxOS and BeOS
+and will build there without special action. It has also been ported to QNX;
+to build under QNX, see the header comments in the Makefile. It is reported to
+build and run under AmigaOS.
- * From:, To:, Cc:, and Reply-To: headers are rewritten so that
- usernames relative to the popclient host become fully-qualified
- Internet addresses. This enables replies to work correctly.
+Further reading
+---------------
-There is a man page at popclient.man. A sample rc file is at sample.poprc.
-For a release history, see the file NEWS.
- -- esr
+The INSTALL file describes how to configure and install fetchmail.
+
+See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS for
+detailed information on recent changes, NOTES for design notes, and TODO for
+a list of things that still need doing. If you want to hack on this code,
+a list of known bugs and to-do items can be found in the file todo.html.
+
+Status, source code
+-------------------
+
+The fetchmail code appears to be stable and free of bugs affecting normal
+operation (that is, retrieving from POP3 or IMAP in single-drop mode and
+forwarding via SMTP to sendmail).
+
+You can get the code from the fetchmail home page:
+
+ http://www.fetchmail.info/
+
+ http://fetchmail.berlios.de/
+
+Enjoy!
+
+ -- esr, ma
projects / ~andy / fetchmail / blobdiff