-Popclient README
+fetchmail README
+================
- $Log: README,v $
- Revision 1.2 1996/06/26 19:08:55 esr
- This is what I sent Harris.
+Introduction
+------------
- Revision 1.1 1996/06/26 15:27:06 esr
- Initial revision
+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).
- Revision 1.3 1995/09/07 22:40:58 ceharris
- Final 3.0b4 release
+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.
- Revision 1.2 1995/08/09 01:22:47 ceharris
- Final preparation for 3.0b2 release.
+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.
- Revision 1.1 1995/08/07 21:09:19 ceharris
- Final preparation for popclient 3.0b1 release
+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.
-This is a BETA release of popclient version 3. Little if any user support
-is provided for this version of popclient. Consider this BETA version to
-be a "developer/tester" release only.
+Portability
+-----------
-Release History
+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.
-3.0b7:
+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.
-Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com> hacked on 3.0b6. Here are his change notes:
+Further reading
+---------------
-CONFIGURATION AND BUILDING
+The INSTALL file describes how to configure and install fetchmail.
-* The autoconfigure script incorrectly assumed that all Linuxes use
- /usr/bin/deliver. Under Linux it now checks for both /usr/bin/delivermail
- and /bin/mail.
+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.
-* I added a distribution-maker production to Makefile.in.
+Status, source code
+-------------------
-OPTIONS AND COMMAND LINE
+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).
-* I have removed the -p command-line option. Given that there's a .poprc
- facility there is no excuse for encouraging users to put plaintext passwords
- in scripts which might be readable.
+You can get the code from the fetchmail home page:
-* Calling popclient with no arguments now causes it to query or operate
- on every host in the .poprc file.
+ http://www.fetchmail.info/
-* I have made --version more useful by having it dump the computed
- connection options for each server specified.
+ http://fetchmail.berlios.de/
-* The user can now explicitly set an MDA (such as procmail) with the
- new option -m or -mda. Various possible MDAs are listed on the man page.
+Enjoy!
-POPRC FILE SYNTAX
+ -- esr, ma
-* The .poprc lexer now supports "-enclosed strings which may contain
- whitespace.
-
-* I added a --yydebug option to enable .poprc parser debugging at runtime
- if the parser was generated with --debug. It's not documented.
-
-* You may now have a `defaults' entry in .poprc which sets overrideable
- values for other entries. See the man page for details.
-
-* It is now possible to set keep, flush and fetchall in your .poprc file.
-
-* Fixed incorrect numbering of source lines in .poprc parse error messages.
-
-* The configure.in specification no longer uses the obsolete AC_TRY_COMPILE
- macro (it uses AC_TRY_LINK instead).
-
-MAILBOX LOCKING
-
-* I have added mandatory locking of mailbox files where supported.
- This will cover Linux systems, in particular.
-
-* The default behavior is now to do lock-protected append on the user's
- system mailbox rather than using delivermail or some other MDA.
- (This is a performance hack.)
-
-* The autoconfigure script now looks for standard mail locations. The
- default mail delivery agent is used only if it can't find a mail spool
- directory in the standard places.
-
-FUNCTIONAL ENHANCEMENTS
-
-* When using POP3, message headers are edited so that replies won't foo up.
- Anything that looks like a mail ID local to the POP host gets @ and the
- pop servername attached to it before being appended to the user's
- mailbox or passed to an MDA.
-
-* I have implemented daemon mode.
-
-DOCUMENTATION
-
-* All changes and feature additions have been tested in actual use and are
- documented on the man page.
-
-* I have turned the comments in the sample.poprc into a new manual
- section documenting the .poprc format.
-
-MISCELLANEOUS BUG FIXES
-
-* I fixed some de-initialization bugs in pop2.c and pop3.c that led to
- fd leaks (these became painfully obvious when I tested daemon mode!).
-
-* I've fixed the flaky parser error messages. They turned out to be due
- to a misdeclaration of yytext.
-
-There's only one feature I haven't been able to add successfully. I
-want a --logfile option that redirects the daemon-mode output to a
-given file, but the code (in daemon.c near 200) unaccountably doesn't
-work (so I haven't documented it yet).
-
-3.0b5
-o "From " header fix in pop2.c and pop3.c
-o Surpress "..." output when --stdout option specified in pop3.c
-
-3.0b4
-o alloca fix.
-o various diagnostic/informational message fixes.
-
-3.0b3
-o Support for retrieving only new messages from maildrop when
- using POP3.
-o Support for retrieving only the first n lines of each message
- when using POP3.
-o APOP authentication support.
-o Buffered socket input.
-
-3.0b2
- This is a "new features" release.
-o support for .poprc file.
-o GNU-style long options.
-o fixed passwords appearing in 'ps' output
-o support for multiple servers on one command line
-
-3.0b1
- This is mostly a test of the autoconfigure integration.
-Among the functions performed by the new configure script, is
-the ability to detect known system types, configures the mail
-delivery agent (MDA) correctly. This should permanently solve
-the problem of using something other than an MDA for mail
-delivery (which continues to plague Linux slackware 1.2.9).
-For this beta, please check the values of MDA_PATH and MDA_ARGS
-carefully. They should match the values found in your
-sendmail.cf file on the line which begins with "Mlocal".
-
- Other changes from popclient version 2.21:
-
-o no longer uses getpass() from the C library. The
- internal getpassword() function allows the use of long
- passwords.
-
-o integrated GNU getopt() for long options. Long option
- names will appear in a future beta.
-
-o Several compiler warnings fixed.
-
-o Fixed problems related to missing include files in
- Solaris port.
projects / ~andy / fetchmail / blobdiff