fetchmail
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 supports every remote-mail protocol now in use on the Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, all flavors of IMAP, and ESMTP ETRN, ODMR, SMTP, LMTP, and local delivery agents.
| Tags | Communications Email |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPL |
Recent releases
- 24 Dec 2008 11:54
Changes: A denial of service due to a NULL pointer dereference, reported as CVE-2007-4565, was fixed. A denial of service in extra verbose (-v -v) mode, reported as CVE-2008-2711, was fixed. A severe memory leak on failed SSL connection attempts was stuffed. Several other bugs were fixed. Documentation was improved. Translations were updated.
- 25 Jun 2008 11:43
Changes: This release fixes denial of service vulnerabilities CVE-2007-4565 and CVE-2008-2711. It also fixes a data loss bug with IMAP in --keep --flush configurations. Fetchmail no longer complains about invalid sslproto when POP3 CAPA probing fails. .fetchids and .fetchmailrc can now be symlinks. fetchmailconf now quotes folder names when writing the configuration. An --sslcommonname option was added to help working with misnamed certificates. Several build systems improvements were made.
- 07 Apr 2007 01:29
Changes: APOP was strengthened to make the CVE-2007-1558 attack harder. Repoll without TLS now takes place immediately if a protocol errors occur after an opportunistic TLS handshake failed. A crash when opening the BSMTP output file failed was fixed. BSMTP no longer refuses to work with PS_SOCKET. SOCKS is now listed in --configdump when compiled in. Several documentation fixes and improvements were made. delete-later was added to the contrib/ section.
- 18 Feb 2007 22:23
Changes: The fixes for the password leak in 6.3.6 unfortunately entailed two regressions: KPOP became non-functional, and a POP3+TLS connection loss would not lead to a retry without TLS if TLS was optional for the connection. These bugs have been fixed.
- 05 Jan 2007 18:27
Changes: This release fixes a password disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2006-5867) and a crash in certain situations (CVE-2006-5974). It re-reads /etc/resolv.conf at the beginning of a poll cycle, solving DNS issues on computers in changing network environments. The --logfile and --user options had been broken in 6.3.5, and have been repaired. Kerberos/GSSAPI error messages have been improved when support for these systems was not compiled in. Assorted minor fixes have been made.
- All comments
Recent commentsBehaviour I didn't expected
I'm using fetchmail for a few years now and I'm very happy about that. Recently I was doing some experiments with "poll" and "skip" and discovered something I didn't expected.
I have two providers, provider1 and provider2. On provider1 I have a mailbox I check with fetchmail running in deamon mode every 10minutes. This part works fine.
On provider2 I have a mailbox I check manually. I was hoping dat "fetchmail provider2" or "fetchmail -d0 provider2" should be working but it didn't, I only got the mail from provider1.
The only thing that works is "fetchmail -q; fetchmail -d0 provider2; fetchmail". So I first have to kill my deamon, get the mail and start fetching it again.
Is there a better work around?
Btw, I'm using release 6.2.5+NTLM+SDPS+SSL+NLS from debian-sarge.
Fetchmail looses mail
Hello, I think I have found a case where fetchmail will lose mail. If 'keep' is being used to leave mail on the server and the number of messages on the server exceeds the fetchlimit, Fetchmail retrieves up to <fetchlimit> messages, then on the next connection ignores all of the messages, as if they have all been retrieved, when they have not.
I am using uidl, if this makes a difference.
Re: Many Features except Robustness
We've since learned that procmail is also problematic as it loads entire files into memory to process just the headers
curiously i am back here because i just had a big success with getmail where fetchmail failed - a message with a 5Mb attachment (compressed dbase image). procmail handled it fine, although the machine has much more memory, of course.
in a way, it's a privilege to be able to worry about procmail (thanks for the tip) - it was fetchmail's inability to grab an earlier file of this size that finally forced me to use getmail (it's always possible, of course, that's it's a fetchmail config error on my part, but i did check and modify config files with no success). i can also now download channel4 news (uk independent news source) email list, which fetchmail choked on because of incorrect headers.
Re: Many Features except Robustness
> I'm using Debian, so installing [getmail] is
> trivial. And it was simple to configure
> - I have it running as a cron job under
> the mail user, piping mail to procmail
> for two users (procmail filters to
> maildirs which are handled by Courier
> imap + Squirrelmail for web access).
> Appears to work fine. You should try
> it...
We've since learned that procmail is also problematic as it loads entire files into memory to process just the headers (or that's what I've heard, haven't read the code yet). In these days of large attachments, that can seriously impact server performance, so we've been looking at a few alternatives.
Just so you know, though, the problem is not so serious that we're scheduling downtime to fix it ;) ... we've known about the problem for a long long time, and yet we still run procmail. What surprises me is how the Linux distros (Mandrake at least) still ship with these really bad-example programs as the default configuration.
Re: Many Features except Robustness
I use(d) fetchmail on my own server and had the same frustrating problems (even with relatively low mail levels it would jam every week or so). After reading your comments (thanks!) I realised it wasn't my fault and switched to getmail.
I'm using Debian, so installing is trivial. And it was simple to configure - I have it running as a cron job under the mail user, piping mail to procmail for two users (procmail filters to maildirs which are handled by Courier imap + Squirrelmail for web access). Appears to work fine. You should try it...