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Note: if you are a stranded fetchmail.com user, we're sorry but we have nothing to do with that site and cannot help you. It's just an unfortunate coincidence of names.
Fetchmail is a 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 supports every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of IMAP, ETRN, and ODMR. It can even support IPv6 and IPSEC.
Fetchmail retrieves mail from remote mail servers and forwards it via SMTP, so it can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as mutt, elm(1) or BSD Mail. It allows all your system MTA's filtering, forwarding, and aliasing facilities to work just as they would on normal mail.
Fetchmail offers better security than any other Unix remote-mail client. It supports APOP, KPOP, OTP, Compuserve RPA, Microsoft NTLM, and IMAP RFC1731 encrypted authentication methods including CRAM-MD5 to avoid sending passwords en clair. It can be configured to support end-to-end encryption via tunneling with ssh, the Secure Shell
Fetchmail can be used as a POP/IMAP-to-SMTP gateway for an entire DNS domain, collecting mail from a single drop box on an ISP and SMTP-forwarding it based on header addresses. (We don't really recommend this, though, as it may lose important envelope-header information. ETRN or a UUCP connection is better.)
Fetchmail can be started automatically and silently as a system daemon at boot time. When running in this mode with a short poll interval, it is pretty hard for anyone to tell that the incoming mail link is not a full-time "push" connection.
Fetchmail is easy to configure. You can edit its dotfile directly, or use the interactive GUI configurator (fetchmailconf) supplied with the fetchmail distribution. It is also directly supported in linuxconf versions 1.16r8 and later.
Fetchmail is fast and lightweight. It packs all its standard features (POP3, IMAP, and ETRN support) in K of core on a Pentium under Linux.
Fetchmail is open-source software. The openness of the sources is your strongest possible assurance of quality and reliability.
See the on-line manual page for basics.
See the HTML Fetchmail FAQ for troubleshooting help.
See the Fetchmail Design Notes for discussion of some of the design choices in fetchmail.
See the project's To-Do list for indications of known problems and requested features.
(Note that the binary RPMs don't have the POP2, OTP, IPv6, Kerberos, GSSAPI, Compuserve RPA, Microsoft NTLM, or GNU gettext internationalization support compiled in. To get any of these you will have to build from sources.)
The latest version of fetchmail is also carried in the Metalab remote mail tools directory.
Note: before submitting a question to the list, please read the FAQ (especially item G3 on how to report bugs). We tend to get the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like a blanket.
Fetchmail was written and is maintained by Eric S. Raymond. There are some designated backup maintainers (Rob Funk, David DeSimone aka Fuzzy Fox, Dave Bodenstab). Other backup maintainers may be added in the future, in order to ensure continued support should Eric S. Raymond drop permanently off the net for any reason.
If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be able help improve fetchmail by lending me a test account on your site. Note that I do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a maildrop. Nor am I interested in collecting maildrops per se -- what I'm collecting is different kinds of servers. Before each release, I run a test harness that sends date-stamped test mail to each site on my regression-test list, then tries to retrieve it. Please take a look at my list of test servers. If you can lend me an account on a kind of server that is not already on this list, please do.
Somewhere around a thousand people have participated on the fetchmail beta lists (at time of current release there were 654 on the friends and announce lists). While it's hard to count the users of open-source software, we can estimate based on (a) population figures at the WELL and other known fetchmail sites, (b) the size of the Linux-using ISP customer base, and (c) the volume of fetchmail-related talk on USENET. These estimates suggest that daily fetchmail users number well into the hundreds of thousands, and possibly over a million.
I wrote a paper, The Cathedral And The Bazaar, about these theories and the project. I developed the line of analysis it suggested in two later essays. These papers became quite popular and (to my continuing astonishment) may have actually helped change the world. Chase the title link, above, for links to all three papers.
I have done some analysis on the information in the project NEWS file. You can view a statistical history showing levels of participation and release frequency over time.
Major changes or additions therefore seem unlikely until there are significant changes in or additions to the related protocol RFCs. One development that would stimulate a new release almost instantly is the deployment of a standard lightweight encrypted authentication method for IMAP sessions.
Fetchmail is supported only for Unix by its official maintainers. However, it is reported to build and run correctly under BeOS, AmigaOS, Rhapsody, and QNX as well.
Scott Bronson has written a fetchmail plugin (actually, a specialist MDA) called trestlemail that helps redirect multidrop mail.
Donncha O Caoihm has written a Perl script called install-sendmail that assists you in installing sendmail and fetchmail together/
Peter Hawkins has written a script called gotmail that can retrieve Hotmail.
A hacker identifying himself simply as `Steines' has written a filter which rewrites the to-line with a line which only includes receipients for a given domain and renames the old to-line. It also rewrites the domainpart of addresses if the offical domain is different to local domain. You can find it here.
Thanks to Steve Matuszek for the graphic design. The hand in the button (and the larger top-of-page graphic) was actually derived from a color scan of the fetchmail author's hand.
Fetchmail was DaveCentral's Best Of Linux winner for June 30 1999.
Fetchmail was a five-star Editor's Pick at Softlandindia.
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