<title>The Fetchmail FAQ</title>
<meta name="description"
content="Frequently asked questions about fetchmail."/>
-<meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, POP, POP2, POP3, IMAP, remote mail"/>
+<meta name="keywords" content="fetchmail, POP3, IMAP, remote mail"/>
</head>
<body>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" summary="Canned page footer">
<hr/>
<h1 id="FAQ">Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail</h1>
-<p>Before reporting any bug, please read <a href="#G3">G3</a> for
-advice on how to include diagnostic information that will get your
-bug fixed as quickly as possible.</p>
+<p><strong>Support? Bug reports?</strong> Please read <a
+href="#G3">G3</a> for what information is required to get your problem
+solved as quickly as possible.</p>
-<p>Note that this FAQ is occasionally updated from the SVN repository
+<p>Note that this FAQ is occasionally updated from the Git repository
and speaks in the past tense ("since") about a fetchmail release that is
not yet available. Please try a release candidate for that version in
case you need the new option.</p>
<a href="#G1">G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?</a><br/>
<a href="#G2">G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?</a><br/>
-<a href="#G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
+<a href="#G3">G3. Something doesn't work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a><br/>
<a href="#G4">G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?</a><br/>
-<a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like Outlook Express.</a><br/>
+<a href="#G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after some days.</a><br/>
<a href="#G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?</a><br/>
<a href="#G7">G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?</a><br/>
<a href="#G8">G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?</a><br/>
<a href="#C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not
from an init script.</a><br/>
<a href="#C7">C7. How can I forward mail to another
-host?.</a><br/>
-
+host?</a><br/>
+<a href="#C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
+from cron!</a><br/>
<h2 id="C_T">How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h2>
<h2 id="C_S">How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h2>
-<a href="#S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</a><br/>
+<a href="#S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?</strike></a><br/>
<a href="#S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?</a><br/>
<a href="#S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?</a><br/>
<a href="#S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a><br/>
<a href="#I7">I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?</a><br/>
<a href="#I8">I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net or other
Maillennium servers?</a><br/>
+<a href="#I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a><br/>
<h2 id="C_K">How to set up well-known security and authentication
methods</h2>
work.</a><br/>
<a href="#R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc
file.</a><br/>
-<a href="#R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
-normally otherwise.</a><br/>
+<a href="#R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates
+ normally otherwise.</strike></a><br/>
<a href="#R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't
work.</a><br/>
<a href="#R6">R6. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.</a><br/>
<a href="#R8">R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain
messages but before deleting them</a><br/>
<a href="#R9">R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches</a><br/>
-<a href="#R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</a><br/>
+<a href="#R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.</strike></a><br/>
<a href="#R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.</a><br/>
<a href="#R12">R12. Fetchmail isn't working and reports getaddrinfo
errors.</a><br />
-<a href="#R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call" mean?</a>
+<a href="#R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call" mean?</a><br />
+<a href="#R14">R14. Since upgrading fetchmail/OpenSSL, I can no longer connect!</a><br />
+<a href="#R15">R15. Help, I'm getting Authorization failure!</a><br />
<h2 id="C_H">Hangs and lockups</h2>
domain properly.</a><br/>
<a href="#M3">M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop,
and I have a mail loop!</a><br/>
-<a href="#M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
-problems.</a><br/>
+<a href="#M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS
+ problems.</strike></a><br/>
<a href="#M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is
processed.</a><br/>
<a href="#M6">M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with
being split.</a><br/>
<a href="#X4">X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different
way.</a><br/>
-<a href="#X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
-much!</a><br/>
+<a href="#X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too
+much!</strike></a><br/>
<a href="#X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or
mangled.</a><br/>
<a href="#X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
messages.</a><br/>
<a href="#X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
with Domino IMAP</a><br/>
+<a href="#X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial messages</a><br/>
+
+
<h2 id="C_O">Other problems</h2>
<a href="#O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile
working?</a><br/>
<a href="#O9">O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same
messages over and over?</a><br/>
-<a href="#O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
-same?</a><br/>
+<a href="#O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the
+ same?</strike></a><br/>
<a href="#O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
immediately" in my logs.</a><br/>
<a href="#O12">O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.</a><br/>
<a href="#O16">O16. Why is the Fetchmail FAQ only available in
ISO-216 A4 format? How do I get the FAQ in Letter
format?</a><br/>
+<a href="#O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
+ in MSG_PEEK."</a><br/>
<hr/>
<h1 id="G">General problems</h1>
not audit itself.</p>
<p>Fetchmail is licensed under the <a
-href="http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">GNU General Public
-License</a>.</p>
+href="http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html">GNU General Public
+License v2</a>. Details, including an exception that allows linking
+against OpenSSL, are in the COPYING file in the fetchmail
+distribution.</p>
<p>If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
fetchmail's full feature list.</p>
distribution. Because it freezes at distribution release time, it
may not be completely current.</p>
-<h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix
-it?</a></h2>
+<h2><a id="G3" name="G3">G3. Something does not work/I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?</a></h2>
<p>The first thing you should to is to upgrade to the newest version of
fetchmail, and then see if the problem reproduces. So you'll probably
<p>Bugs will be fixed, provided you include enough diagnostic information
for me to go on. Send bugs to <a
href="mailto:fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de">fetchmail-users</a>.
-When reporting bugs, please include the following:</p>
+When sending bugs or asking for help, please <strong>do not make up
+ information except your password</strong> and please
+<strong>report</strong> the following:</p>
<ol>
<li>Your operating system.</li>
name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you
installed.</li>
-<li>A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.</li>
-
<li>The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
forwarding to.</li>
<li>Any command-line options you used.</li>
-<li>The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other
-command-line options you used.</li>
+<li>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail -V</kbd> called with
+whatever other command-line options you used.</li>
+
+<li><strong>The output of <kbd>env LC_ALL=C fetchmail --nodetach -vvv
+--nosyslog</kbd> with whatever other command-line options you use
+routinely.</strong>
+ <p>It is very important that the transcript include your
+POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server
+problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are
+specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.</p>
+</li>
</ol>
<p>If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have
failure was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in
the same way. In a very few tries, you should be able to identify
the exact adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was
-introduced – and with information like that, I can usually come up
-with a fix very quickly.</p>
-
-<p>Another useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to
-test for IMAP4 support on your mailserver using the autoprobe
-function of fetchmailconf. If you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf
-doesn't tell you it's broken, switch immediately. POP3 is a weak,
-poorly-designed protocol with chronic problems, and the later
-versions after RFC1725 actually get worse rather than better.
-Changing over to IMAP4 may well make your problem go away – and if
-your ISP doesn't have IMAP4 support, bug them to supply it.</p>
-
-<p>It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
+introduced. <strong>Please</strong> include session transcripts (as
+described in the last bullet point above) of <strong>both
+the working and failing versions.</strong> Often, the source of the problem
+can instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
+transactions.</p>
+
+<p>It may helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc file, but not
necessary unless your symptom seems to involve an error in
configuration parsing. If you do send in your .fetchmailrc, mask
-the passwords first!</p>
+the passwords first! Otherwise, fetchmail -V – as directed above
+– will usually suffice.</p>
<p>If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look
mangled (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted
mail chain to screw up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you
may be able to fix these by tweaking your configuration.</p>
-<p>A transcript of the failed session with "--nosyslog --nodetach -vvv"
-(yes, that's <em>three</em> -v options, enabling debug mode) will almost
-always be useful. It is very important that the transcript include your
-POP/IMAP server's greeting line, so I can identify it in case of server
-problems. This transcript will not reveal your passwords, which are
-specially masked out precisely so transcripts can be passed around.</p>
-
-<p>If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should
-include session transcripts with "--nosyslog --nodetach -vvv" of both
-the working and failing versions. Very often, the source of the problem
-can instantly identified by looking at the differences in protocol
-transactions.</p>
-
<p>If the bug involves a core dump or hang, a gdb stack trace is
good to have. (Bear in mind that you can attach gdb to a running
but hung process by giving the process ID as a second argument.)
notes</a>. Note that this document is partially obsoleted by the
<a href="design-notes.html">updated design notes.</a></p>
-<h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail behave like
-Outlook Express.</a></h2>
+<h2><a id="G5" name="G5">G5. I want to make fetchmail remove kept mail after
+some days.</a></h2>
<p>The second-most-requested feature for fetchmail, after
content-based filtering, is the ability to have it remove messages
from a maildrop after N days, typically to be used with the
-<code>keep</code> option as a sort of poor man's newsgroup
-facility. Microsoft's Outlook Express supports this.</p>
+<code>keep</code> option. Several messaging programs with graphical
+user interface support this feature.</p>
<p>This feature is not yet implemented. It may be at a future date,
spare time of developers permitting.</p>
+<p>For the time being, the contrib/ directory contains some <em>unsupported</em>
+ tools that may help, namely mold-remover.py and delete-later.</p>
+
<h2><a id="G6" name="G6">G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging
tips?</a></h2>
<p>There is a fetchmail-users list
<fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de>
for bug reports and people who want to discuss configuration issues of
-fetchmail. It's a Mailman list, see <a
- href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>.</p>
+fetchmail. Please see <a href="#G3">G3 above for information you need to
+report.</a> It's a Mailman list, see <a
+ href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users</a>
+for info and subscription.</p>
<p>There is a fetchmail-devel list
<fetchmail-devel@lists.berlios.de> for people who want to discuss
fixes and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's a
Mailman list, which you can sign up for at <a
-href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.
-There is also an announcements-only list,
+href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-devel</a>.</p>
+<p>There is also an announcements-only list,
<fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de>, which you can sign up for at <a
href="http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce">http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce</a>.</p>
<h2><a id="G8" name="G8">G8. What is the best server to use with
fetchmail?</a></h2>
-<p>Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
+<p>Fetchmail will work with any POP3, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR server
that conforms to the relevant standards/RFCs (and even some outright
broken ones like <a href="#S2">Microsoft Exchange</a> and <a
href="#S6">Novell GroupWise</a>). This doesn't mean it works equally
-well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without UIDL,
+well with all, however. POP3 servers without UIDL
limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the manual
page.</p>
utility - unfortunately it does not detect SSL-wrapped variants).</p>
<p>If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an
-IMAP4rev1 or UIDL- and TOP-capable POP3 server. IMAP enables some
-significant performance optimizations.</p>
-
-<p>Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just
-plain broken (see item <a href="#S2">S2</a>) and NT cannot handle
-the sustained load of a high-volume remote mail server. Even
-Microsoft itself knows better than to try this; their own Hotmail
-service runs over Solaris! For extended discussion, see John
-Kirch's excellent <a href="http://unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/">white
-paper</a> on Unix vs. NT performance.</p>
+IMAP4rev1 or UIDL-capable POP3 server.</p>
<p>A decent POP3/IMAP server that has recently become popular is <a
href="http://dovecot.org/">Dovecot</a>.</p>
you see something in the greeting line that looks like an
angle-bracket-enclosed Internet address with a numeric left-hand
part, that's an APOP challenge (it will vary each time you log in).
-You can register a secret on the host (using
-<code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like it). Specify the
+For some hosts, you need to register a secret on the host (using
+<code>popauth(8)</code> or some program like that). Specify the
secret as your password in your .fetchmailrc; it will be used to
encrypt the current challenge, and the encrypted form will be sent
-back the the server for verification.</p>
+back the the server for verification. Note that APOP is no longer
+considered secure since March 2007.</p>
<p>Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require
you to set up some magic files in your home directory on your
response.</p>
<p>If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can
-use their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See <a
-href="#I1">I1</a> for details. If you are fetching mail from
+use their RPA authentication. See <a href="#I1">I1</a> for details.
+If you are fetching mail from
Microsoft Exchange using IMAP, you will be able to use NTLM.</p>
<p>Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use
every 5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled
every 30 minutes.</p>
-<h2><a id="C6" name="C6">Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
+<h2><a id="C6" name="C6">C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually,
but not from an init script.</a></h2>
<p>Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
fetchmail on, use the <code>smtphost</code> or
<code>smtpname</code> option. See the manual page for details.</p>
+<h2><a id="C8" name="C8">C8. Why is "NOMAIL" an error?/I frequently get messages
+from cron!</a></h2>
+
+<p>Some users want to write scripts that take action only if mail
+could/could not be retrieved, thus fetchmail reports if it has retrieved
+messages or not.</p>
+
+<p>If you do not want "no mail" to be an error condition (for instance,
+for cron jobs), use a POSIX-compliant shell and add this to the end of
+the fetchmail command line, it will change an exit code of 1 to 0 and
+others to 1:</p>
+<pre>
+|| [ $? -eq 1 ]
+</pre>
+
+<p>If you want to map more than one code to 0, you cannot cascade multiple
+<strong>|| [ $? -eq N ]</strong>, but you must instead use the
+<strong>-o</strong> operator inside the brackets, (see the test(1)
+manpage for details), such as:</p>
+
+<pre>
+|| [ $? -eq 1 -o $? -eq 9 ]
+</pre>
+
+<p>A full cron line might then look like this:</p>
+
+<pre>
+*/15 * * * * fetchmail -s || [ $? -eq 1 ]
+</pre>
+
+
<hr/>
<h1>How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs</h1>
<h2><a id="T1" name="T1">T1. How can I use fetchmail with
<hr/>
<h1>How to make fetchmail work with various servers</h1>
-<h2><a id="S1" name="S1">S1. How can I use fetchmail with
-qpopper?</a></h2>
-
-<p>Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3
-servers, and is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some
-problems which fetchmail exposes. We recommend using <a
-href="#G8">IMAP</a> instead if at all possible. If you must talk to
-qpopper, here are some problems to be aware of:</p>
-
-<h3>Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53</h3>
-
-<p>Tony Tang <a
-href="mailto:tony@atn.com.hk"><tony@atn.com.hk></a> reports
-that there is a bad intercation between fetchmail and qpopper 2.5.3
-under Red Hat Linux versions 5.0 to 5.2, kernels 2.0.34 to 2.0.35.
-When fetching very large messages (over 700K) from 2.5.3, fetchmail
-will hang with a socket error.</p>
-
-<p>This is probably not a fetchmail bug, but rather a symptom of
-some problem in the networking stack that qpopper's transmission
-pattern is tickling, as fetchpop (another Linux POP client) also
-displays the hang but Netscape running under Win95 does not. The
-problem can also be banished by <a
-href="http://www.eudora.com/freeware/qpop.html">upgrading to
-qpopper 3.0b1</a>.</p>
-
-<h3>Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7</h3>
-
-<p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
-interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See <a
-href="#X5">X5</a> for details. The solution is to upgrade your
-fetchmail.</p>
+<h2><a id="S1" name="S1"><strike>S1. How can I use fetchmail with
+ qpopper?</strike></a></h2>
+
+<p><em>The information that used to be here was obsolete and dropped.</em></p>
<h2><a id="S2" name="S2">S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft
Exchange?</a></h2>
a terminating newline get the POP3 message termination dot emitted
-- you guessed it -- right after the last character of the message,
with no terminating newline added. This will hang fetchmail or any
-other RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
+other RFC-compliant client. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.</p>
+
+<p>Exchange 2003 SP2 has been observed to alter MIME boundary
+lines in multipart messages between one IMAP FETCH command and the next
+under some circumstances -- for instance, when the top-level
+Content-Transfer-Encoding is "binary" (which is commonplace with Perl's
+MIME::Lite module). This causes MUAs to not detect attachments, but
+render the whole message body as one lump of hardly legible to
+unintelligible text, rather than nicely presenting text part and
+attachments or images separately. The cause is that Exchange uses its
+own message store and needs to convert back to MIME message format
+on-the-fly, and apparently this is sometimes subject to such
+inconsistencies.
+</p>
-<p>Older versions of Exchange are semi-usable. They randomly drop
-attachments on the floor, though. Microsoft acknowledges this
-as a known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.</p>
+<p>Fetchmail using IMAP usually supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
+with Microsoft Exchange servers. "Usually" here means that it fails on some
+servers for reasons that we haven't been able to debug yet, perhaps it's
+related to the NTLM domain.</p>
-<p>Fetchmail using IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used
-with M$ Exchange servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with
+<p>To enable this NTLM mode, configure fetchmail with
the --enable-NTLM option and recompile it. Specify a user option
value that looks like 'user@domain': the part to the left of the @
will be passed as the username and the part to the right as the
NTLM domain.</p>
-<p>M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
+<p>Microsoft Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command
does not reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the
sizes of the compressed versions in the exchange mail database
(thanks to Arjan De Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this
problem).</p>
-<p>Fetchmail works with M$ Exchange, despite this brain damage. Two
-features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
+<p>Fetchmail works with Microsoft Exchange, despite this brain damage.
+Two features are compromised. One is that the --limit option will not
work right (it will check against compressed and not actual sizes).
The other is that a too-small SIZE argument may be passed to your
ESMTP listener, assuming you're using one (this should not be a
problem unless the actual size of the message is above the
listener's configured length limit).</p>
-<p>Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
+<p>ESR learned that there's supposed to be a
registry bit that can fix this breakage:</p>
<pre>
deleted.</dd>
</dl>
-<p>The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me
+<p>The Microsoft employee who revealed this information to ESR
admitted that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public
knowledge base.</p>
as its symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias".
Grant Edwards writes:</p>
-<p>This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing stupid to
+<blockquote><p>This means that Exchange Server is too [...] stupid to
figure out which mailbox belongs to you. Instead of actually
keeping track of which inbox belongs to which user, it uses some
half-witted, guess-o-matic heuristic to try to guess your mailbox
<p>In your case it doesn't work because your username maps to more
than one mailbox. For some people it doesn't work because their
-username maps to zero mailboxes. This is yet another inept, lame,
-almost criminally negligent design decision from our friends in
-Redmond.</p>
+username maps to zero mailboxes.</p>
<p>You've got several options:</p>
<li>Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
explicitly to your mailbox name.</li>
</ul>
-
-<p>But, the best option involves a tactical nuclear weapon (an old
-ASROC will do), pissing off a lot people who live downwind from
-Redmond, and your choice of any Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, or Solaris
-CD-ROM.</p>
+</blockquote>
<h2><a id="S3" name="S3">S3. How can I use fetchmail with HP
OpenMail?</a></h2>
the LIST are rounded to the nearest 1024 bytes. It also has a nasty
habit of discarding headers it doesn't recognize, such as X- and
Resent- headers.</p>
-
-<p>As with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to
-get a POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead.
-OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
+<p>OpenMail's project manager claims these bugs have been fixed in
6.0.</p>
<p>We've had a more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP
-command fails, returning only one line regrardless of its argument,
+command fails, returning only one line regardless of its argument,
on something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".</p>
<h2><a id="S4" name="S4">S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?</a></h2>
-<p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server would be better named
-GroupFoolish; it is (according to the designer of IMAP) unusably
-broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required content
-length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
+<p>The Novell GroupWise IMAP server is (according to the designer of
+IMAP) unusably broken. Among other things, it doesn't include a required
+content length in its BODY[TEXT] response.</p>
-<p>Fetchmail works around this problem, but we strongly recommend
-voting with your dollars for a server that isn't brain-dead. If you
-stick with code as shoddy as GroupWise seems to be, you will
-probably pay for it with other problems.</p>
+<p>Fetchmail works around this problem to some extent, but no guarantees.</p>
<h2><a id="S5" name="S5">S5. How can I use fetchmail with
InterChange?</a></h2>
<p>You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see
-attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server;
+attachments. InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server (<a
+ href="#S6">see below</a>):
it reports the message length with attachments but doesn't download
them on TOP or RETR.</p>
-<p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing
-me that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this
-problem. I don't have any reports one way or the other yet.</p>
+<p>On Jan 9 2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent ESR mail informing
+him that their new 3.61.08 release of InterChange fixed this
+problem.</p>
<h2><a id="S6" name="S6">S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?</a></h2>
You may need to raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf
to avoid having fetched mail rejected.</p>
-<p>(Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's
-servers. They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding
-another provider.)</p>
-
<h2><a id="I4" name="I4">I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities
POP3 servers?</a></h2>
Geocities' servers sometimes think that the first 45 messages have
already been read.</p>
-<p>Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
-Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.</p>
-
<h2><a id="I5" name="I5">I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail or Lycos Webmail?</a></h2>
<p>You can't directly. But you can use fetchmail with hotmail or lycos
<p>Workaround for older versions: use the <tt>fetchall</tt> option.</p>
+<h2><a id="I9" name="I9">I9. How can I use fetchmail with GMail/Google Mail?</a></h2>
+
+<p>Google's IMAP servers, as of April 2008, are broken and re-encode
+MIME-encoded headers improperly and are not feature-complete yet. The
+model how their servers organize mail also deviates in significant ways
+from what the POP3 or IMAP protocol 'fathers' conceived. This means all
+sorts of strange effects, for instance, your sent mail may show up in
+the mail that fetchmail fetches. It's best to avoid fetching mail from
+Google until they are using standards-compliant software.</p>
+
+<p>If you still need to use Google's mail service, these links may help (valid as of 2011-04-13):</p>
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=12805">Other ways to access Gmail > POP</a></li>
+ <li><a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=12806">Other ways to access Gmail > IMAP</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47948">Using POP on multiple clients or mobile devices</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13291">Some [POP3] mail was not downloaded</a></li>
+<li><a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78774">I'm having problems downloading [IMAP] mail</a></li>
+</ul>
+
<hr/>
<h1>How to set up well-known security and authentication
methods</h1>
<h2><a id="K1" name="K1">K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?</a></h2>
-<p>Giuseppe Guerini added a --with-socks option that supports
-linking with socks library. If you specify the value of this option
-as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
+<p>Giuseppe Guerini added a <kbd>--with-socks</kbd> compile-time option
+that supports linking with socks library. If you specify the value of
+this option as "yes", the configure script will try to find the Rconnect
library and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a
directory containing the Rconnect library.</p>
-<p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar --with-socks5 option that may
+<p>Alan Schmitt has added a similar <kbd>--with-socks5</kbd> option that may
work better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.</p>
+<p>In either case, fetchmail has no direct configuration hooks, but you
+can specify which socks configuration file the library should read by
+means of the <tt>SOCKS_CONF</tt> environment variable. In order to
+bypass the SOCKS proxy altogether, you could run (adding your usual
+options to the end of this line):</p>
+
+<pre>env SOCKS_CONF=/dev/null fetchmail</pre>
+
<h2><a id="K2" name="K2">K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and
IPsec?</a></h2>
IMAP-GSS protocol?</a></h2>
<p>Fetchmail can use RFC1731 GSSAPI authorization to safely
-identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share Kerberos
-V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
-IMAP server. UW-IMAP (available via FTP at <a
-href="ftp://ftp.cac.washington.edu/mail/">ftp.cac.washington.edu</a>)
-is the only one I'm aware of and the one I recommend anyway for
-other reasons. You'll need version 4.1-FINAL or greater though, and
-it has to have GSS support compiled in.</p>
-
-<p>Neither UW-IMAP nor fetchmail compile in support for GSS by
-default, since it requires libraries from the Kerberos V
-distribution (available via FTP at <a
-href="ftp://athena-dist.mit.edu/pub/ATHENA/kerberos">athena-dist.mit.edu</a>).
-If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
+identify you to your IMAP server, as long as you can share
+Kerberos V credentials with your mail host and you have a GSSAPI-capable
+IMAP server.</p>
+
+<p>fetchmail does not compile in support for GSS by
+default, since it requires libraries from a Kerberos V
+distribution, such as <a href="http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/">MIT
+ Kerberos</a> or <a href="http://www.h5l.org/">Heimdal
+ Kerberos</a>.</p>
+
+<p>If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple: add a
<code>--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]</code> option to
configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V libraries
installed under /usr/krb5 so I run <code>configure
SSL?</a></h2>
<p>You'll need to have the <a
-href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed.
+href="http://www.openssl.org/">OpenSSL</a> libraries installed, and they
+should at least be version 0.9.7.
Configure with --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries
-installed in the default location (/usr/local/ssl) ths will
+installed in commonly-used default locations, this will
suffice. If you have them installed in a non-default location,
-you'll need to specify it as an argument to --with-ssl after an
-equal sign.</p>
-
-<p>Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek
-under OpenSSL versions 0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally
-tripped over, causing hangs. It is recommended that you install
-0.9.6 or later.</p>
+you'll need to specify the OpenSSL installation directory as an argument
+to --with-ssl after an equal sign.</p>
<p>Fetchmail binaries built this way support <code>ssl</code>,
<code>sslkey</code>, and <code>sslcert</code> options that control
-SSL encryption. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
+SSL encryption, and will automatically use <code>tls</code> if the
+server offers it. You will need to have an SSL-enabled mailserver to
use these options. See the manual page for details and some words
of care on the limited security provided.</p>
daemon, that option is not available in this case.</p>
<p>If you don't have the libraries installed, but do have the
-OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work:</p>
+OpenSSL utility toolkit, something like this may work (but will not
+authenticate the server):</p>
<pre>
poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
<h2><a id="R3" name="R3">R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an
invalid rc file.</a></h2>
+<p>Note that this bug should no longer occur when using prepackaged
+fetchmail versions or installing unmodified original tarballs, since
+these ship with a proper parser .c file.</p>
+
<p>This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been
known to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of
<code>flex</code> installed. The problem appears to be a result of
<p>Fix: build and install the latest version of <a
href="http://flex.sourceforge.net/">flex</a>.</p>
-<h2><a id="R4" name="R4">R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
-operates normally otherwise.</a></h2>
-
-<p>We've had this reported to us under Linux using libc-5.4.17 and
-gcc-2.7.2. It does not occur with libc-5.3.12 or earlier
-versions.</p>
+<h2><a id="R4" name="R4"><strike>R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but
+ operates normally otherwise.</strike></a></h2>
-<p>Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library
-malloc.</p>
-
-<p>We're told there is some problem with the malloc() code in that
-version which makes it fragile in the presence of multiple free()
-calls on the same pointer (the malloc arena gets corrupted).
-Unfortunately it appears from doing gdb traces that whatever free()
-calls producing the problem are being made by the C library itself,
-not the fetchmail code (they're all from within fclose, and not an
-fclose called directly by fetchmail, either).</p>
+<p><em>The information that used to be here referred to bugs in Linux libc5
+ systems, which are deemed obsolete by now.</em></p>
<h2><a id="R5" name="R5">R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode
doesn't work.</a><br/>
fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
same options with -N (nodetach) is OK. We have another report of
similar behavior from one Linux user, but many other Linux users
-reportt no problem.</p>
+report no problem.</p>
<p>If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with
the code in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon
<p>This is probably a general networking issue. Sending a "RETR"
command will cause the server to start sending large amounts of
data, which means large packets. If your networking layer has a
-packet-fragmentation problem, that's where you'll see it.</p>
-
-<h2><a id="R10" name="R10">R10. Fetchmail is dying with
-SIGPIPE.</a></h2>
+packet-fragmentation problem or improper firewall settings break Path
+MTU discovery (when for instance all ICMP traffic is blocked), that's
+where you'll see it.</p>
-<p>This probably means you have an <code>mda</code> option. Your
-MDA is croaking while being passed a message. Best fix is to remove
-the <code>mda</code> option and pass mail to your port 25 SMTP
-listener.</p>
+<h2><a id="R10" name="R10"><strike>R10. Fetchmail is dying with
+ SIGPIPE.</strike></a></h2>
-<p>If for some reason you are invoking sendmail via the
-<tt>mda</tt> option (rather than delivering to port 25 via smtp),
-don't forget to include the -i switch. Otherwise you will
-occasionally get mysterious delivery failures with a SIGPIPE as the
-sendmail instance dies. The problem is messages with a single dot
-at start of a text line.</p>
+<p><em>Fetchmail 6.3.5 and newer block SIGPIPE, and many older versions have
+ already handled this signal, so you shouldn't be seeing SIGPIPE
+at all.</em></p>
<h2><a id="R11" name="R11">R11. My server is hanging or emitting
errors on CAPA.</a></h2>
<h2><a id="R13" name="R13">R13. What does "Interrupted system call"
mean?</a></h2>
-<p>Fetchmail 6.3.5 and newer gave up on the older timeout handling which
-could cause unstable behavior. Instead, timeouts now interrupt
-long-running functions and are reported as "Interrupted system
-call".</p>
+<p>Non-fatal signals (such as timers set by fetchmail itself) can
+interrupt long-running functions and will then be reported as
+"Interrupted system call". These can sometimes be timeouts.</p>
+
+<h2><a id="R14" name="R14">R14. Since upgrading fetchmail/OpenSSL, I can no longer connect!</a></h2>
+
+<p>If the upgrade you did encompassed an upgrade to OpenSSL 1.0.0 or newer, you
+may need to run <code>c_rehash</code> on your certificate directories,
+particularly if you are using local certs directories (f. i. through fetchmail's <code>--sslcertpath</code> option).</p>
+
+<p>Reason: OpenSSL 1.0.0, relative to earlier versions, uses a different hash
+for the symbolic links (symlinks) in its <code>certs/</code> directory, so you
+need to recreate the symlinks by running <kbd>c_rehash
+ /etc/ssl/certs</kbd> (adjust this to where your installation keeps its
+certificates), and you cannot easily share this certs directory with
+applications linked against older OpenSSL versions.</p>
+
+<p>Note: OpenSSL's <code>c_rehash</code> script is broken in several versions,
+which can cause malfunction if several OpenSSL tools versions are installed in
+parallel in separate directories. In such cases, you may need a workaround to
+get things going. Assuming your OpenSSL 1.0.0 is installed in
+<code>/opt/openssl1.0.0</code> and your certificates are in
+<code>/home/hans/certs</code>, you'd do this (the corresponding fetchmail
+option is <kbd>--sslcertpath /home/hans/certs</kbd> on the commandline and
+<kbd>sslcertpath /home/hans/cert</kbd> in the rcfile):</p>
+
+<pre>
+env PATH=/opt/openssl1.0.0/bin /opt/openssl1.0.0/bin/c_rehash /home/hans/certs
+</pre>
-<p>While this loses accuracy of timeout reporting, there is
-unfortunately no safe way for C to make extensive use of error
-reporting, and the amount of code that would need to be added is too
-large for a stable series as 6.3.X is.</p>
+<h2><a id="R15" name="R15">R15. Help, I'm getting Authorization failure!</a></h2>
+
+<p>First, try upgrading to fetchmail 6.3.18 or newer. Release 6.3.18 has
+received a considerable number of bug fixes for the authentication
+feature (AUTH, AUTHENTICATE, SASL). Most notably, fetchmail aborts SASL
+authentication attempts properly with an asterisk if it detects that it
+cannot make progress with a particular authentication scheme. This fixes
+issues where GSSAPI-enabled fetchmail cannot authenticate against
+Microsoft Exchange 2007 and 2010. <strong>Note</strong> that this is a
+bug in old fetchmail versions!</p>
+
+<p>Fetchmail by default attempts to authenticate using various schemes.
+Fetchmail tries these schemes in order of descending security, meaning
+the most secure schemes are tried first.</p>
+
+<p>However, sometimes the server offers a secure authentication scheme
+that is not properly configured, or an authentication scheme such as
+GSSAPI does requires credentials to be acquired externally. In some
+situations, fetchmail cannot know the scheme will fail without trying
+it. In most cases, fetchmail should proceed to the next authentication
+scheme automatically, but this sometimes does not work.</p>
+
+<p><strong>Solution:</strong> Configure the right authentication scheme
+explicitly, for instance, with <kbd>--auth cram-md5</kbd> or <kbd>--auth
+ password</kbd> on the command line or <code>auth "cram-md5"</code> or
+ <code>auth "password"</code> in the rcfile. Details can be found
+ in the manual page.<br />
+ <strong>Note</strong> that auth password should only be used
+ across secure links (see the sslcertck and ssl/sslproto options).
+ </p>
<hr/>
<h1>Hangs and lockups</h1>
<h2><a id="H3" name="H3">H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching
mail.</a></h2>
-<p>The symption: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
+<p>Symptom: 'fetchmail -v' retrieves the first few messages,
but hangs returning:</p>
<pre>
<p>One POP3 daemon used in the Berkeley Unix world that reports
itself as POP3 version 1.004 actually throws the queue away. 1.005
fixed that. If you're running this one, upgrade immediately. (It
-also truncates long lines at column 1024)</p>
+also truncates long lines at column 1024.)</p>
<p>Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the
-whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others will restore it
+whole mail queue after about 10 minutes. Better ones will restore it
right away. If you have an interruption and don't see it right
away, cross your fingers and wait ten minutes before retrying.</p>
-<p>Some servers (such as Microsoft's NTMail) are mis-designed to
-restore the entire queue, including messages you have deleted. If
-you have one of these and it flakes out on you a lot, try setting a
-small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This will result in more IP
-connects to the server, but will mean it actually executes changes
-to the queue more often.</p>
-
-<p>Qualcomm's qpopper, used at many BSD Unix sites, is better
-behaved. If its connection is dropped, it will first execute all
-DELE commands as though you had issued a QUIT (this is a technical
-violation of the POP3 RFCs, but a good idea in a world of flaky
-phone lines). Then it will re-queue any message that was being
-downloaded at hangup time. Still, qpopper may require a noticeable
-amount of time to do deletions and clean up its queue. (Fetchmail
-waits a bit before retrying in order to avoid a 'lock busy'
-error.)</p>
+<p>Good servers are designed to restore the entire queue, including
+messages you have deleted. If you have one of these and it flakes out on
+you a lot, try setting a small <code>--fetchlimit</code> value. This
+will result in more IP connects to the server, but will mean it actually
+executes changes to the queue more often.</p>
<h2><a id="D3" name="D3">D3. Mail that was being fetched when I
interrupted my fetchmail seems to have been vanished.</a></h2>
<p>Workaround: add the '<code>fetchall</code>' keyword to your
fetch options.</p>
-<p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP4</a>
+<p>Solution: switch to an <a href="http://www.imap.org/">IMAP4</a>
server.</p>
<hr/>
multidrop mail is going to root anyway.</a></h2>
<p>Somehow your fetchmail is never recognizing the hostname part of
-recipient names it parses out of To/Cc/envelope-header lines as
-matching the name of the mailserver machine. To check this, run
+recipient names it parses out of Envelope-header lines (or these are
+improperly configured) as
+matching a name within the designated domains. To check this, run
fetchmail in foreground with -v -v on. You will probably see a lot
of messages with the format "line rejected, %s is not an alias of
the mailserver" or "no address matches; forwarding to %s."</p>
-<p>These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration
-problem either on the server or your client machine.</p>
+<p>These errors usually indicate some kind of configuration
+problem.</p>
<p>The easiest workaround is to add a '<code>via</code>' option (if
-necessary) and add enough aka declarations to cover all of your
-mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
-take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be
-uncollected if it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you
-don't have listed).</p>
-
-<p>It would be better to fix your DNS, however. DNS problems can
-hurt you in lots of ways, for example by making your machines
-intermittently or permanently unreachable to the rest of the
-net.</p>
+necessary) and add enough '<code>aka</code>' declarations to cover all
+of your mailserver's aliases, then say '<code>no dns</code>'. This will
+take DNS out of the picture (though it means mail may be uncollected if
+it's sent to an alias of the mailserver that you don't have listed).</p>
<p>Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing
problem described in <a href="#M7">M7</a>.</p>
<p>If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode
may do (though you <em>are</em> going to get hurt by some mailing
list software; see the caveats under THE USE AND ABUSE OF MULTIDROP
-MAILBOXES on the man page). If you want to try it, the way to do it
-is with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
+MAILBOXES on the man page, and check what is needed at <a
+ href="http://home.pages.de/~mandree/mail/multidrop">Matthias
+ Andree's "Requisites for working multidrop
+ mailboxes"</a>). If you want to try it, the way to do it is
+with the '<code>localdomains</code>' option.</p>
<p>In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two
other things:</p>
<p>Some ways of accumulating a whole domain's messages in a single
server mailbox mean it all ends up with a single envelope address
-that is useless for rerouting purposes. You may have to set
+that is useless for rerouting purposes. In this particular case, sell
+your ISP a clue. If that does not work, you may have to set
'<code>no envelope</code>' to prevent fetchmail from being
-bamboozled by this.</p>
+bamboozled by this, but a missing envelope makes multidrop routing
+unreliable.</p>
<p>Check also answer <a href="#T1">T1</a> on a reliable way to do
multidrop delivery if your ISP (or your mail redirection provider)
<p>If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with
<code>sendmail -bv</code>.</p>
-<h2><a id="M4" name="M4">M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
-having DNS problems.</a></h2>
-
-<p>We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in <a
-href="#R1">R1</a>!) who solved this problem by removing the
-reference to -lresolv from his link line and relinking. Apparently
-in some older Linux distributions the libc5 bind library version
-works better.</p>
+<h2><a id="M4" name="M4"><strike>M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be
+having DNS problems.</strike></a></h2>
-<p>As of 2.2, the configure script has been hacked so the bind
-library is linked only if it is actually needed. So under Linux it
-won't be, and this problem should go away.</p>
+<p><em>The answer that used to be here no longer applies to
+ fetchmail.</em></p>
<h2><a id="M5" name="M5">M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each
message is processed.</a></h2>
operation that might significantly slow down the retrieval of large
mail batches.</p>
+<p>The real solution however is to make sure that fetchmail can find the
+envelope recipient properly, which will reliably prevent this message
+duplication.</p>
+
<hr/>
<h1>Mangled mail</h1>
<h2><a id="X1" name="X1">X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in
suggest is replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not
RFC822 conformant.</p>
-<h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at start of
-line are being split.</a></h2>
+<h2><a id="X3" name="X3">X3. Messages containing "From" at the start of
+ line are being split.</a></h2>
<p>If you know the messages aren't split in your server mailbox,
then this is a problem with your POP/IMAP server, your client-side
simulation along with the other things described in the FAQ entry
on <a href="#G3">reporting bugs</a>.</p>
-<h2><a id="X5" name="X5">X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
-fetching too much!</a></h2>
+<h2><a id="X5" name="X5"><strike>X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be
+ fetching too much!</strike></a></h2>
-<p>This may happen in versions of fetchmail after 4.4.1 and before
-4.4.8. Versions after 4.4.1 use POP3's TOP command rather than
-RETR, in order to avoid marking the message seen (leaving it unseen
-is helpful for later recovery if you lose your connection in the
-middle of a retrieval).</p>
-
-<p>Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad
-interaction with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. The TOP
-bounds check was fooled by an overflow condition in the TOP
-argument. Decrementing the TOP argument in 4.4.7 fixed this.</p>
-
-<p>Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.</p>
-
-<p>Workaround: set the <code>fetchall</code> option. Under POP3
-this has the side effect of forcing RETR use.</p>
+<p><em>The information that used to be here pertained to fetchmail 4.4.7 or
+ older, which should not be used. Use a recent fetchmail version.</em></p>
<h2><a id="X6" name="X6">X6. My mail attachments are being dropped
or mangled.</a></h2>
<p>We've had sporadic reports of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
Outlook servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship
attachments to your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by
-Microsft.</p>
+Microsoft.</p>
<p>They may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you
see unreadable attachments with a ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
Messenger and other clients use a FETCH BODY[] to grab the whole
message. When fetchmail uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH
RFC822.TEXT to get first the header and then the body, Domino
-generates different Boundary tags for each part, .e.g. one tag is
+generates different Boundary tags for each part, e.g. one tag is
declared in the Content-type header and another is used to separate
the MIME parts in the body. This doesn't work. (I have heard a
rumor that this bug is scheduled to be fixed in Domino release 6;
<h2><a id="X7" name="X7">X7. Some mail attachments are hanging
fetchmail.</a></h2>
-<p>This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know
-anything about mail attachments and doesn't treat them any
-differently from plain message data.</p>
+<p>Fetchmail doesn't know anything about mail attachments and doesn't
+treat them any differently from plain message data.</p>
<p>The most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your
network transport layer's capability to handle the very large
<h2><a id="X8" name="X8">X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my
messages.</a></h2>
-<p>Blame it on that rancid pile of dung and offal called Microsoft
-Exchange. Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
-IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100%.
+<p>Due to the problem described in <a href="#S2">S2</a>, the
+IMAP support in fetchmail cannot follow the IMAP protocol 100 %.
Most of the time it doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an
SMTP server that behaves unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at
-message end.</p>
+the message end.</p>
<p>One piece of software that can trigger this is the Interchange
mail server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what
happens:</p>
-<p>1. Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
+<ol><li>Someone sends mail to your account. The last line of the
message contains text. So at the SMTP level, the message ends with,
-e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</p>
+e.g. "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"</li>
-<p>2. The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
+<li>The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes
the end of the message. However, instead of doing the normal thing,
which is tossing out the ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as
part of the email body, Interchange throws out the whole
"\r\n.\r\n", and leaves the email body without any line terminator
at the end of it. RFC821 does not forbid this, though it probably
-should.</p>
+should.</li>
-<p>3. Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
+<li>Fetchmail, or some other IMAP client, asks for the message.
IMAP returns it, but it's enclosed inside parentheses, according to
the protocol. The message size in bytes is also present. Because
the message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client
-sees:</p>
+sees:
<pre>
-
....blahblah)...
</pre>
-<p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p>
+<p>where the ')' is from IMAP.</p></li>
-<p>4. Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
-stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.</p>
+<li>Fetchmail only deals with complete lines, and can't trust the
+stated message size because Microsoft Exchange goofs it up.</li>
-<p>5. As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
+<li>As a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts
it at the end of the message it forwards on. If you have verbosity
-on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</p>
+on, you'll get a message about actual != expected.</li>
+</ol>
-<p>There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in <a
-href="#S2">S2</a> looks more tempting all the time.</p>
+<p>There is no fix for this.</p>
<h2><a id="X9" name="X9">X9. Missing "Content-Transfer-Encoding" header
with Domino IMAP</a></h2>
Kim's list post</a>
</p>
+<h2><a id="X10" name="X10">X10. Fetchmail delivers partial
+ messages</a></h2>
+
+<p>Fetchmail is sometimes reported to deliver partial messages. This
+is usually related to network outages that occur while fetchmail is
+downloading a message body. In such cases, fetchmail has downloaded a
+complete header, so your header will be intact. The message body will be
+truncated, and fetchmail will later attempt to redownload the
+message (providing the server is standards conformant).</p>
+
+<p>The reason for the truncation is that fetchmail streams the body
+directly from the POP3/IMAP server into the SMTP/LMTP server or MDA (in
+order to save memory), so fetchmail has already written a part of the
+message before it notices it will be incomplete, and fetchmail cannot
+abort a transaction it has started, and it's unclear if it ever will be
+able to, because this is not standardized and the outcome will depend on
+the receiving software (be it SMTP/LMTP or MDA).</p>
+
<hr/>
<h1>Other problems</h1>
<h2><a id="O1" name="O1">O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if
<p>This is a feature, not a bug. It's in line with normal practice
for system daemons and allows you to suppress logging by removing
-the log, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts. To
-get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
-(this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it
-already exists).</p>
+the log file, without hacking potentially fragile startup scripts.
+To get around it, just touch(1) the logfile before you run fetchmail
+(this will have no effect on the contents of the logfile if it already
+exists).</p>
-<h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message
+<h2><a id="O2" name="O2">O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message,
the header is dumped to all my terminal sessions.</a></h2>
<p>Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery,
-which Netscape and other clients doesn't do; the announcement of
+which Mozilla and other clients don't do; the announcement of
new messages is done by a daemon that sendmail pokes. There should
be a "biff" command to control this. Type</p>
<p>which is essentially what <code>biff -n</code> will do. If this
doesn't work, comment out any reference to "comsat" in your
-/etc/inetd.conf file and restart inetd.</p>
+/etc/inetd.conf file and reload (or restart) inetd.</p>
<p>In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile
is</p>
every poll cycle?</a></h2>
<p>No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify
-your rc file and restart, reading it.</p>
+your rc file and restart, reading it. Note that this causes troubles if
+you need to provide a password via the console, unless you're running in
+--nodetach mode.</p>
<h2><a id="O4" name="O4">O4. Why do deleted messages show up again
when I take a line hit while downloading?</a></h2>
-<p>Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an
-IMAP with a long expunge interval.</p>
-
<p>According to the POP3 RFCs, deletes aren't actually performed
until you issue the end-of-session QUIT command. Fetchmail cannot
-fix this, because doing it right takes cooperation from the server.
-There are two possible remedies:</p>
-
-<p>One is to switch to qpopper (the free POP3 server from Qualcomm,
-the Eudora people). The qpopper software violates the POP3 RFCs by
-doing an expunge (removing deleted messages) on a line hangup, as
-well as on processing a QUIT command.</p>
+fix this, but there is a workaround: use the --expunge option with a
+reasonably low figure that works for you. Try 10 for a start.</p>
-<p>The other (which we recommend) is to switch to <a
-href="http://www.imap.org">IMAP</a>. IMAP has an explicit expunge
-command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete messages
-immediately after they are downloaded.</p>
+<p>IMAP is less susceptible to this problem, because the "deleted"
+message marks are persistent, but they aren't in POP3. Note that the
+--expunge default for IMAP is different than the default for POP3.</p>
<p>If you get very unlucky, you might take a line hit in the window
between the delete and the expunge. If you've set a longer expunge
also each time it gets a HELO in listener mode.</p>
<p>Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups
-to fail and time out. Check <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code> and
-<code>/etc/hosts</code> file. Make sure your hostname and
-fully-qualified domain name are both in <code>/etc/hosts</code>,
-and that hosts is looked at before DNS is queried. You probably
-also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the hosts file.</p>
+to fail and time out. Check your <code>/etc/resolv.conf</code>,
+<code>/etc/host.conf</code>, <code>/etc/nsswitch.conf</code> (if you
+have the latter two) and you <code>/etc/hosts</code> files. Make sure
+your hostname and fully-qualified domain name are both in
+<code>/etc/hosts</code>, and that hosts is looked at before DNS is
+queried. You probably also want your remote mail server(s) to be in the
+hosts file.</p>
-<p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by
-reconfiguring with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
+<p>You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
+with <code>FEATURE(nodns)</code>.</p>
<p>Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may
help, and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well.
<p>First, check to see that you haven't enabled the
<cite>keep</cite> and <cite>fetchall</cite> option. If you have,
-turn <cite>keep</cite> off.</p>
-
-<p>There are various forms of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL
-feature that can lead to all your old messages being seen again
-after a line drop. I have given up trying to fix these, as the UIDL
-code breaks worse every time I touch it. The problem is
-fundamental; maintaining and garbage-collecting the right kind of
-client-side state is just hard. Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and
-removed LAST should be hung up by his thumbs and whipped with
-scorpions. The right answers are either (a) live with the
-occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4, or (c) fix the code
-yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose (c), I don't want
-to hear about it.</p>
+turn one of them off - which one, depends on why they have been set in
+the first place, and to a lesser degree on the upstream server.</p>
<p>This can also happen when some other mail client is logged in to
your mail server, if it uses a simple exclusive-locking scheme (and
messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a) wait
for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.</p>
-<p>James Stevens <James.Stevens at kyzo.com> writes:</p>
-
-<p><em>We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from
-an NT POP3 server. Fetchmail was correctly collecting and deleting
-each e-mail one by one. However,the dial-up connection was very
-unreliable and would often just drop out in the middle of a
-session.</em></p>
-
-<p><em>Interestingly, unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated
-normally (I guess with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll
-back all the deletes !!!</em></p>
-
-<p><em>This meant if the first e-mail was very large it might just
-end up continuously collecting it, basically jamming the queue. Or,
-if the queue became very full itmight never get a long enough phone
-connection to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back
-any deletes, so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the
-first few e-mails again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became
-fuller and fuller the chances of getting a connection long enough
-to collect theentire mailbox became smaller and smaller.</em></p>
-
-<p><em>Our solution was to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5
-or 10) e-mails at atime, thus trying to ensure that the POP3
-connection is terminated correctly.</em></p>
-
-<p>Unfortunately, this is exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed
-to behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend
-switching to IMAP and using a short expunge interval.</p>
-
-<h2><a id="O10" name="O10">O10. Why is the received date on all my
-messages the same?</a></h2>
+<h2><a id="O10" name="O10"><strike>O10. Why is the received date on all my
+ messages the same?</strike></a></h2>
-<p>This is a design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking
-the received date from the last Received header.</p>
+<p><em>The answer that used to be here made no sense and was dropped.</em></p>
<h2><a name="O11">O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll
immediately" in my logs.</a></h2>
-<p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.</p>
+<p>This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.
+Because some servers like to drop the connection after that probe,
+fetchmail will re-poll immediately with this probe defeated.</p>
<p>If you run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
get the message only once per run.</p>
occurs if your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
your local server is.</p>
-<p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>.</p>
+<p>Or you could declare <code>antispam 451</code>, which is not
+recommended though, as it may cause mail loss.</p>
<p>Or, you could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
dns errors.</p>
<h2><a name="O13">O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.</a></h2>
<p>Write a <code>preconnect</code> command in your configuration file that
-does something like "date >> $HOME/Procmail/fetchmail.log".</p>
+does something like "date >> $HOME/fetchmail.log".</p>
<h2><a name="O14">O14. Fetchmail no longer deletes oversized mails with
--flush.</a></h2>
first message in your mailbox. This usually stems from a message like
the one shown below, which is automatically created on your server. This
message shows up if the University of Washington IMAP or PINE software
-is used on the server together with a POP2 or POP3 daemon that is not
+is used on the server together with a POP3 daemon that is not
aware of these messages, such as some versions of Qualcomm Popper
(QPOP):</p>
make fetchmail-FAQ.pdf
</pre>
+<h2><a name="O17">O17. Linux logs "TCP(fetchmail:...): Application bug, race
+ in MSG_PEEK."</a></h2>
+<p>That's in fact a bug in Linux kernels around the late 2.6.2X versions,
+rather than fetchmail. Fetchmail has no race bugs around MSG_PEEK,
+as of version 6.3.9. The message can safely be ignored.</p>
<hr/>
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