Fetchmail | 2024-11-12 |
On 2024-11-12, fetchmail 6.5.1 has been released (click this link to download, or to see recent changes). It is the second fetchmail 6.5 release and polishes a few areas to improve the buildability, adds a few strings to the translations that were missed in 6.5.0, and also adds warnings about deprecating crypto material that is based on MD4, MD5, or SHA1.
Fetchmail 6.5.0 on 2024-10-29 was the first fetchmail 6.5 release and shipped with ten message translations besides English. While maintaining good compatibility with single-unix-specification v3+ and newer compliant systems, it now requires a C99 compilation environment. Fetchmail supports being built by meson 1.3.0 or newer, and mentions that POP3 LAST errors aren't a bug. It can also be built with wolfSSL 5.7.2 or newer. OpenSSL versions before 3.0.9 are no longer supported. The release tarball was built with autotools though, but either build toolset (autoconf/automake or meson) should yield a reasonable install.
As of 2024-09-24, fetchmail 6.4 and older releases are no longer supported. Use fetchmail 6.5.
On 2024-05-14, SOURCEFORGE has recognized fetchmail with the Open Source Excellence award for reaching 100,000 downloads from their site. The SOURCEFORGE project page now displays a relevant badge.
Note that this neither counts downloads from the prior BerliOS hosting, personal homepages of the maintainer, nor installations via redistributions, mirror sites, binary packages.
These have been moved to a separate page (click here for security information) to unclutter the front page.
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 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 protection against password-sniffing 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 open-source and free software.
See the Fetchmail Feature List for more about what fetchmail does.
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.
The developers use Git for revision control. To browse the repository or to get the latest development version, find the instructions at https://gitlab.com/fetchmail/fetchmail. The fetchmail FAQ in section G2 lists the widely-known and active branches.
See the project page for more, including downloads.
Before submitting a question anywhere, please read the FAQ (especially item G3 on how to report problems). We tend to get the same three newbie questions over and over again. The FAQ covers them like a blanket.
There is a fetchmail-users list for help and other user discussion
of fetchmail. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at
fetchmail-users@lists.sourceforge.net.
There is also a
fetchmail-devel list for people who want to discuss fixes and
improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. That one is at
fetchmail-devel@lists.sourceforge.net.
Finally, there is a low-traffic announcements-only list,
fetchmail-announce@lists.sourceforge.net.
Fetchmail originated as a program called popclient, written by Carl Harris. In 1996, Eric S. Raymond took over; he soon renamed the program to fetchmail after adding IMAP support.
In 2004 a new team took over, led by Rob Funk, Graham Wilson, and Matthias Andree. Since then, Graham Wilson has retreated, and Sunil Shetye has contributed several important pieces of code.
We welcome your code contributions. But even if you don't write code, you can help fetchmail improve.
If you administer a site that runs a post-office server, you may be able help improve fetchmail by lending us a test account on your site. Note that we do not need a shell account for this purpose, just a mailbox and a mail address. Nor are we interested in collecting maildrops per se -- what we're collecting is different kinds of servers.
Before each release, we run a test harness that sends date-stamped test mail to each site on our regression-test list, then tries to retrieve it. Please take a look at the list of test servers. If you can lend us an account on a kind of server that is not already on this list, please do.
The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been extensively tested under 4.4BSD, SunOS, Solaris, AIX, and NEXTSTEP. It should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it requires only POSIX plus BSD sockets, and uses GNU autoconf).
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. There is a CygWin port.
fdm: A software package that integrates basic filtering is Nicholas Marriott's fdm.
getmail: When fetchmail's development was
stalled before the latest team took over, Charles Cazabon's getmail came
along as an intended replacement. It still doesn't do everything that
fetchmail does, and often suffers from Python library shortcomings, for
instance when it comes to SSL, but it's close enough to give us a bit of
competition.
There is also an inofficial unsanctioned
fork called getmail6 with adaptations to work with Python 3.
animail: Another contender with integrated filtering was, but is currently unmaintained, Juanjo Álvarez Martínez's Animail.
GetLive, a successor to the discontinued Gotmail. (Gotmail was a script to fetch mail from Hotmail, written by Peter Hawkins, which used to live at the now defunct http://linux.cudeso.be/linuxdoc/gotmail.php)
There's a program called
mailfilter which can be used
to do spam filtering, that works particularly well called from fetchmail's
preconnect
directive.