   (This document was generated from fetchmail-FAQ.html)

   Back to Fetchmail Home Page To Site Map $Date: 2000/03/04 00:13:09 $
     _________________________________________________________________
   
                  Frequently Asked Questions About Fetchmail
                                       
   Before reporting any bug, please read G3 for advice on how to include
   diagnostic information that will get your bug fixed as quickly as
   possible.
   
   If you have a question or answer you think ought to be added to this
   FAQ list, mail it to fetchmail's maintainer, Eric S. Raymond, at
   esr@snark.thyrsus.com.
   
                              General questions:
                                       
   G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?
   G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?
   G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?
   G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?
   G5. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?
   G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?
   G7. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?
   G8. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?
   G9. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?
   G10. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?
   G11. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?
   G12. Is any special configuration needed to send mail?
   G13. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?
   G14. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?
   
                             Build-time problems:
                                       
   B1. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.
   B2. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.
   
                Fetchmail configuration file grammar questions:
                                       
   F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc no longer work?
   F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.
   F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning
   with `no'.
   F4. I'm getting a `parse error' message I don't understand.
   
                           Configuration questions:
                                       
   C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root on my own
   machine?
   C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get killed when I log
   out?
   C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?
   C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam features?
   C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less often than others?
   C6. Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not from an init
   script.
   C7. How can I forward mail to another host?.
   
              How to make fetchmail play nice with various MTAs:
                                       
   T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?
   T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?
   T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?
   T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?
   T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?
   T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?
   
               How to make fetchmail work with various servers:
                                       
   S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?
   S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?
   S3. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?
   S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?
   S5. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?
   S6. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?
   S7. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?
   S8. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?
   S9. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?
   S10. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?
   S11. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?
   S12. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?
   S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?
   S14. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?
   
         How to set up well-known security and authentication methods:
                                       
   K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?
   K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?
   K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?
   K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?
   K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?
   
                             Runtime fatal errors:
                                       
   R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed'
   messages.
   R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.
   R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc file.
   R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.
   R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.
   R6. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.
   R7. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.
   R8. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade
   R9. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain messages but before
   deleting them
   R10. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches
   
                               Disappearing mail
                                       
   D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any
   mail.
   D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped connection.
   D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems
   to have been vanished.
   
                           Multidrop-mode problems:
                                       
   M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop mail is going to
   root anyway.
   M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local domain properly.
   M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop, and I have a mail
   loop!
   M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS problems.
   M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is processed.
   M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with majordomo?
   M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses from my Received
   headers as it should.
   M8. Users are getting multiple copies of messages.
   
                                 Mangled mail:
                                       
   X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.
   X2. My mail client can't see a Subject line.
   X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.
   X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different way.
   X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too much!
   
                                Other problems:
                                       
   O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile doesn't exist.
   O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header is dumped to all
   my terminal sessions.
   O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll cycle?
   O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take a line hit while
   downloading?
   O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From
   address?
   O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the start of each
   poll cycle.
   O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted order?
   O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option working?
   O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same messages over and
   over?
   
                                   Answers:
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G1. What is fetchmail and why should I bother?

   Fetchmail is a one-stop solution to the remote mail retrieval problem
   for Unix machines, quite useful to anyone with an intermittent PPP or
   SLIP connection to a remote mailserver. It can collect mail using any
   variant of POP or IMAP and forwards via port 25 to the local SMTP
   listener, enabling all the normal forwarding/filtering/aliasing
   mechanisms that would apply to local mail or mail arriving via a
   full-time TCP/IP connection.
   
   Fetchmail is not a toy or a coder's learning exercise, but an
   industrial-strength tool capable of transparently handling every
   retrieval demand from those of a simple single-user ISP connection up
   to mail retrieval and rerouting for an entire client domain. Fetchmail
   is easy to configure, unobtrusive in operation, powerful,
   feature-rich, and well documented.
   
   Fetchmail is Open Source software. The openness of the sources is the
   strongest assurance of quality you can have. Extensive peer review by
   a large, multi-platform user community has shown that fetchmail is as
   near bulletproof as the underlying protocols permit.
   
   Fetchmail is licensed under the GNU General Public License.
   
   If you found this FAQ in the distribution, see the README for
   fetchmail's full feature list.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G2. Where do I find the latest FAQ and fetchmail sources?

   The latest HTML FAQ is available alongside the latest fetchmail
   sources at the fetchmail home page:
   http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/fetchmail. You can also usually find both
   in the POP mail tools directory on Sunsite.
   
   A text dump of this FAQ is included in the fetchmail distribution.
   Because it freezes at distribution release time, it may not be
   completely current.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G3. I think I've found a bug. Will you fix it?

   Yes I will, provided you include enough diagnostic information for me
   to go on. Send bugs to fetchmail-friends. When reporting bugs, please
   include the following:
    1. Your operating system and compiler version.
    2. A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.
    3. The name and version of the SMTP listener or MDA you are
       forwarding to.
    4. Any command-line options you used.
    5. The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other command-line
       options you used.
       
   If you have FTP access to your remote mail account, and you have any
   suspicion that the bug was triggered by a particular message, please
   include a copy of the message that triggered the bug.
   
   Often, the first thing I will do when you report a bug is tell you to
   upgrade to the newest version of fetchmail, and then see if the
   problem reproduces. So you'll probably save us both time if you
   upgrade and test with the latest version before sending in a bug
   report.
   
   It is 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!
   
   If fetchmail seems to run and fetch mail, but the headers look mangled
   (that is, headers are missing or blank lines are inserted in the
   headers) then read the FAQ items in section X before submitting a bug
   report. Pay special attention to the item on diagnosing mail mangling.
   There are lots of ways for other programs in the mail chain to screw
   up that look like fetchmail's fault, but you may be able to fix these
   by tweaking your configuration.
   
   A transcript of the failed session with -v -v (yes, that's two -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 the transcript can be passed around.
   
   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.) You will need
   to reconfigure with
   

CFLAGS=-g LDFLAGS=" " ./configure

   and then rebuild in order to generate a version that can be
   gdb-traced.
   
   Best of all is a mail file which, when fetched, will reproduce the bug
   under the latest (current) version.
   
   Any bug I can reproduce will usually get fixed very quickly, often
   within 48 hours. Bugs I can't reproduce are a crapshoot. If the
   solution isn't obvious when I first look, it may evade me for a long
   time (or to put it another way, fetchmail is well enough tested that
   the easy bugs have long since been found). So if you want your bug
   fixed rapidly, it is not just sufficient but nearly necessary that you
   give me a way to reproduce it.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G4. I have this idea for a neat feature. Will you add it?

   Probably not. Most of the feature suggestions I get are for ways to
   set various kinds of administrative policy or add more spam filtering
   (the most common one, which I used to get about four million times a
   week and got really tired of, is for tin-like kill files).
   
   You can do spam filtering better with procmail or maildrop on the
   server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf domain
   exclusions. You can do other policy things better with the mda option
   and script wrappers around fetchmail. If it's a
   prime-time-vs.-non-prime-time issue, ask yourself whether a wrapper
   script called from crontab would do the job.
   
   I'm not going to do these; fetchmail's job is transport, not policy,
   and I refuse to change it from doing one thing well to attempting many
   things badly. One of my objectives is to keep fetchmail simple so it
   stays reliable.
   
   For reasons fetchmail doesn't have other commonly-requested features
   (such as password encryption, or multiple concurrent polls from the
   same instance of fetchmail) see the design notes.
   
   Fetchmail is a mature project, no longer in constant active
   development. It is no longer my top project, and I am going to be
   quite reluctant to add features that might either jeopardize its
   stability or involve me in large amounts of coding.
   
   All that said, if you have a feature idea that really is about a
   transport problem that can't be handled anywhere but fetchmail, lay it
   on me. I'm very accommodating about good ideas.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G5. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?

   There is a fetchmail-friends list for people who want to discuss fixes
   and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it. It's at
   fetchmail-friends@thyrsus.com. There is also an announcements-only
   list, fetchmail-announce@thyrsus.com.
   
   Both lists are SmartList reflectors; sign up in the usual way with a
   message containing the word "subscribe" in the subject line sent to
   fetchmail-friends-request@thyrsus.com or
   fetchmail-announce-request@thyrsus.com. (Similarly, "unsubscribe" in
   the Subject line unsubscribes you, and "help" returns general list
   help)
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?

   The fetchmail development was also a sociological experiment, an
   extended test to see if my theory about the critical features of the
   Linux development model is correct.
   
   The experiment was a success. I wrote a paper about it titled The
   Cathedral and the Bazaar which was first presented at Linux Kongress
   '97 in Bavaria and very well received there. It was also given at
   Atlanta Linux Expo, Linux Pro '97 in Warsaw, and the first Perl
   Conference, at UniForum '98, and was the basis of an invited
   presentation at Usenix '98. The folks at Netscape tell me it helped
   them decide to give away the source for Netscape Communicator.
   
   If you're reading a non-HTML dump of this FAQ, you can find the paper
   on the Web with a search for that title.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G7. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?

   The short answer: IMAP4rev1 running over Unix.
   
   Here's a longer answer:
   
   Fetchmail will work with any POP, IMAP, or ESMTP/ETRN server that
   conforms to the relevant RFCs (and even some outright broken ones like
   Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise). This doesn't mean it works
   equally well with all, however. POP2 servers, and POP3 servers without
   LAST, limit fetchmail's capabilities in various ways described on the
   manual page.
   
   Most modern Unixes (and effectively all Linux/*BSD systems) come with
   POP3 support preconfigured (but beware of the horribly broken POP3
   server mentioned in D2). An increasing minority also feature IMAP (you
   can detect IMAP support by running fetchmail in AUTO mode, or by using
   the `Probe for supported protocols' function in the fetchmailconf
   utility).
   
   If you have the option, we recommend using or installing an IMAP4rev1
   server; it has the best facilities for tracking message `seen' states.
   It also recovers from interrupted connections more gracefully than
   POP3, and enables some significant performance optimizations.
   
   Don't be fooled by NT/Exchange propaganda. M$ Exchange is just plain
   broken (see item S2) 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 white paper on Unix
   vs. NT performance.
   
   You can find sources for IMAP software at The IMAP Connection; we like
   the open-source UW IMAP server, which is the reference implementation
   of IMAP. UW IMAP's support for GSSAPI gives you a good way to
   authenticate without sending a password en clair.
   
   Source for a high-quality supported implementation of POP is available
   from the Eudora FTP site. Don't use 2.5, which has a rather
   restrictive license. The 2.5.2 version appears to restore the
   open-source license of previous versions.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G8. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?

   Fetchmail will work with all popular mail transport programs. It also
   doesn't care which user agent you use, and user agents are as a rule
   almost equally indifferent to how mail is delivered into your system
   mailbox. So any of the popular Unix mail agents -- elm, pine mh, or
   mutt -- will work fine with fetchmail.
   
   All this having been said, I can't resist putting in a discreet plug
   for mutt. My own personal mail setup is sendmail plus fetchmail plus
   mutt. Mutt's interface is only a little different from that of its
   now-moribund ancestor elm, but its excellent handling of MIME and PGP
   put it in a class by itself. You won't need its built-in POP3 support,
   though; most of the mutt developers will cheerfully admit that
   fetchmail's is better :-).
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G9. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?

   Depending on what your mail server you are talking to, this ranges
   from trivial to impossible. It may even be next to useless.
   
   Most people use fetchmail over phone wires, which are hard to tap.
   Anybody with the skill and resources to do this could get into your
   server mailbox with much less effort by subverting the server host. So
   if your provider setup is modem wires going straight into a service
   box, you probably don't need to worry.
   
   In general there is little point in trying to secure your fetchmail
   transaction unless you trust the security of the server host you are
   retrieving mail from. Your vulnerability is more likely to be an
   insecure local network on the server end (e.g. to somebody with a
   TCP/IP packet sniffer intercepting Ethernet traffic between the modem
   concentrator you dial in to and the mailserver host).
   
   Having realized this, you need to ask whether password encryption
   alone will really address your security exposure. If you think you
   might be snooped between server and client, it's better to use
   end-to-end encryption on your whole mail stream so none of it can be
   read. One of the advantages of fetchmail over conventional SMTP-push
   delivery is that you may be able to arrange this by using ssh(1); see
   K3.
   
   Note that ssh is not a complete privacy solution either, as your mail
   could have been snooped in transit to your POP server from wherever it
   originated. For best security, agree with your correspondents to use a
   tool such as GPG (Gnu Privacy Guard) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy).
   
   If ssh/sshd isn't available, or you find it too complicated for you to
   set up, password encryption will at least keep a malicious cracker
   from deleting your mail, and require him to either tap your connection
   continuously or crack root on the server in order to read it.
   
   You can deduce what encryptions your mail server has available by
   looking at the server greeting line (and, for IMAP, the response to a
   CAPABILITY query). Do a fetchmail -v to see these, or telnet direct to
   the server port (110 for POP3, 143 for IMAP).
   
   The facility you are most likely to have available is APOP. This is a
   POP3 feature supported by many servers (fetchmailconf's autoprobe
   facility will detect it and tell you if you have it). If 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 popauth(8) or some program like
   it). 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.
   
   Alternatively, you may have Kerberos available. This may require you
   to set up some magic files in your home directory on your client
   machine, but means you can omit specifying any password at all.
   
   Fetchmail supports two different Kerberos schemes. One is a POP3
   variant called KPOP; consult the documentation of your mail server to
   see if you have it (one clue is the string "krb-IV" in the greeting
   line on port 110). The other is an IMAP facility described by RFC1731.
   You can tell if this one is present by looking for AUTH=KERBEROS_V4 in
   the CAPABILITY response.
   
   If you are fetching mail from a CompuServe POP3 account, you can use
   their RPA authentication (which works much like APOP). See S3 for
   details. If you are fetching mail from Microsoft Exchange, you will be
   able to use NTLM.
   
   Your POP3 server may have the RFC1938 OTP capability to use one-time
   passwords (if it doesn't, you can get OTP patches for the 2.2 version
   of the Qualcomm popper from Craig Metz). To check this, look for the
   string "otp-" in the greeting line. If you see it, and your fetchmail
   was built with OPIE support compiled in (see the distribution INSTALL
   file), fetchmail will detect it also. When using OTP, you will specify
   a password but it will not be sent en clair.
   
   Sadly, there is at present (September 1999) no OTP or APOP-like
   facility generally available on IMAP servers. However, there do exist
   patches which will OTP-enable the University of Washington IMAP
   daemon, version 4.2-FINAL. We have a report that the GSSAPI support in
   fetchmail works with the GSSAPI support in the most recent version of
   UW IMAP. Or you can use SSL for complete end-to-end encryption if you
   have an SSL-enabled mailserver.
   
   You can get both POP3 and IMAP OTP patches from Craig Metz at
   http://www.inner.net/pub/.
   
   These patches use a SASL authentication method named "X-OTP" because
   there is not currently a standard way to do this; fetchmail also uses
   this method, so the two will interoperate happily. They better,
   because this is how Craig gets his mail ;-)
   
   (One important win of OTP is that it's not subject to U.S. export
   restrictions.)
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G10. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?

   Yes. In order to avoid giving indigestion to certain picky MTAs
   (notably exim), fetchmail always makes the RCPT TO address it feeds
   the MTA a fully qualified one with a hostname part. Normally it does
   this by appending @ and "localhost", but when you are using Kerberos
   or ETRN mode it will append @ and your machine's fully-qualified
   domain name (FQDN).
   
   Appending the FQDN can create problems when fetchmail is running in
   daemon mode and outlasts the dynamic IP address assignment your client
   machine had when it started up.
   
   Since the new IP address (looked up at RCPT TO interpretation time)
   doesn't match the original, the most benign possible result is that
   your MTA thinks it's seeing a relaying attempt and refuses. More
   frequently, fetchmail will try to connect to a nonexistent host
   address and time out. Worst case, you could up forwarding your mail to
   the wrong machine!
   
   Use the smtpaddress option to force the appended hostname to one with
   a (fixed) IP address of 127.0.0.1 in your /etc/hosts. (The name
   `localhost' will usually work; or you can use the IP address itself).
   
   Only one fetchmail option interacts directly with your IP address,
   `interface'. This option can be used to set the gateway device and
   restrict the IP address range fetchmail will use. Such a restriction
   is sometimes useful for security reasons, especially on multihomed
   sites. See C3.
   
   I recommend against trying to set up the interface option when
   initially developing your poll configuration -- it's never necessary
   to do this just to get a link working. Get the link working first,
   observe the actual address range you see on connections, and add an
   interface option (if you need one) later.
   
   If you're using a dynamic-IP configuration, one other (non-fetchmail)
   problem you may run into with outgoing mail is that some sites will
   bounce your email because the hostname your giving them isn't real
   (and doesn't match what they get doing a reverse DNS on your
   dynamically-assigned IP address). If this happens, you need to hack
   your sendmail so it masquerades as your host. Setting
   
DMsmarthost.here

   in your sendmail.cf will work, or you can set
   
MASQUERADE_AS(smarthost.here)

   in the m4 configuration and do a reconfigure. (In both cases, replace
   smarthost.here with the actual name of your mailhost.) See the
   sendmail FAQ for more details.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G11. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?

   No. You can use fetchmail with SOCKS, the standard tool for
   indirecting TCP/IP through a firewall. You can find out about SOCKS,
   and download the SOCKS software including server and client code, at
   the SOCKS distribution site.
   
   The specific recipe for using fetchmail with a firewall is at K1
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G12. Is any special configuration needed to send mail?

   A user asks: but how do we send mail out to the POP3 server? Do I need
   to implement another tool or will fetchmail do this too?
   
   Fetchmail only handles the receiving side. The sendmail or other
   preinstalled MTA on your client machine will handle sending mail
   automatically; it will ship mail that is submitted while the
   connection is active, and put mail that is submitted while the
   connection is inactive into the outgoing queue.
   
   Normally, sendmail is also run periodically (every 15 minutes on most
   Linux systems) in a mode that tries to ship all the mail in the
   outgoing queue. If you have set up something like pppd to
   automatically dial out when your kernel is called to open a TCP/IP
   connection, this will ensure that the mail gets out.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G13. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?

   Fetchmail is fully Y2K-compliant.
   
   Fetchmail could theoretically have problems when the 32-bit time_t
   counters roll over in 2038, but I doubt it. Timestamps aren't used for
   anything but log entry generation. Anyway, if you aren't running on a
   64-bit machine by then, you deserve to lose.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
G14. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?

   No. Fetchmail is a mail transport agent, best understood as a protocol
   gateway between POP3/IMAP servers and SMTP. Disconnected operation
   requires an elaborate interactive client. It's a very different
   problem.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
B1. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.

   In the immortal words of Alan Cox the last time this came up: ``Take
   the Solaris lex and stick it up the backside of a passing Sun
   salesman, then install flex and use that. All will be happier.''
   
   I couldn't have put it better myself, and ain't going to try now.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
B2. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.

   If you get errors resembling these
   
mxget.o(.text+0x35): undefined referenceto `__res_search'
mxget.o(.text+0x99): undefined reference to`__dn_skipname'
mxget.o(.text+0x11c): undefined reference to`__dn_expand'
mxget.o(.text+0x187): undefined reference to`__dn_expand'
make: *** [fetchmail] Error 1

   then you must add "-lresolv" to the LOADLIBS line in your Makefile
   once you have installed the `bind' package.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no longer work?

  If your file predates 5.1.0
  
   In 5.1.0, the auth keyword and option were changed to preauth.
   
  If your file predates 4.5.5
  
   If the dns option is on (the default), you may need to make sure that
   any hostname you specify (for mail hosts or for an SMTP target) is a
   canonical fully-qualified hostname). In order to avoid DNS overhead
   and complications, fetchmail no longer tries to derive the fetchmail
   client machine's canonical DNS name at startup.
   
  If your file predates 4.0.6:
  
   Just after the `via' option was introduced, I realized that the
   interactions between the `via', `aka', and `localdomains' options were
   out of control. Their behavior had become complex and confusing, so
   much so that I was no longer sure I understood it myself. Users were
   being unpleasantly surprised.
   
   Rather than add more options or crock the code, I re-thought it. The
   redesign simplified the code and made the options more orthogonal, but
   may have broken some complex multidrop configurations. Any multidrop
   configurations that depended on the name just after the `poll' or
   `skip' keyword being still interpreted as a DNS name for
   address-matching purposes, even in the presence of a `via' option,
   will break.
   
   It is theoretically possible that other unusual configurations (such
   as those using a non-FQDN poll name to generate Kerberos IV tickets)
   might also break; the old behavior was sufficiently murky that we
   can't be sure. If you think this has happened to you, contact the
   maintainer.
   
  If your file predates 3.9.5:
  
   The `remote' keyword has been changed to `folder'. If you try to use
   the old keyword, the parser will utter a warning.
   
  If your file predates 3.9:
  
   It could be because you're using a .fetchmailrc that's written in the
   old popclient syntax without an explicit `username' keyword leading
   the first user entry attached to a server entry. This error can be
   triggered by having a user option such as `keep' or `fetchall' before
   the first explicit username. For example, if you write
   
poll openmail protocol pop3
        keep user "Hal DeVore" there is hdevore here

   the `keep' option will generate an entire user entry with the default
   username (the name of fetchmail's invoking user).
   
   The popclient compatibility syntax was removed in 4.0. It complicated
   the configuration file grammar and confused users.
   
  If your file predates 2.8:
  
   The `interface', `monitor' and `batchlimit' options changed after 2.8.
   
   They used to be global options with `set' syntax like the batchlimit
   and logfile options. Now they're per-server options, like `protocol'.
   
   If you had something like
   
        set interface = "sl0/10.0.2.15"

   in your .fetchmailrc file, simply delete that line and insert
   `interface sl0/10.0.2.15' in the server options part of your
   `defaults' declaration.
   
   Do similarly for any `monitor' or `batchlimit' options.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
F2. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my all-numeric user name.

   Either upgrade to a post-5.0.5 fetchmail or put string quotes around
   it. :-)
   
   The configuration file parser in older fetchmail versions treated any
   all-numeric token as a number, which confused it when it was expecting
   a name. String quoting forces the token's class.
   
   The lexical analyzer in 5.0.6 and beyond is smarter and assumes any
   token following "username" or "password" is a string.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with
`no'.

   See F2 You're caught in an unfortunate crack between the newer-style
   syntax for negated options (`no keep', `no rewrite' etc.) and the
   older style run-on syntax (`nokeep', `norewrite' etc.).
   
   Upgrade to a 5.0.6 or later fetchmail, or put string quotes around
   your token.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
F4. I'm getting a `parse error' message I don't understand.

   The most common cause of mysterious parse errors is putting a server
   option after a user option. Check the manual page; you'll probably
   find that by moving one or more options closer to the `poll' keyword
   you can eliminate the problem.
   
   Yes, I know these ordering restrictions are hard to understand.
   Unfortunately, they're necessary in order to allow the `defaults'
   feature to work.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
C1. Why do I need a .fetchmailrc when running as root on my own machine?

   Ian T. Zimmerman <itz@rahul.net> asked:
   
   On the machine where I'm the only real user, I run fetchmail as root
   from a cron job, like this:
   
    fetchmail -u "itz" -p POP3 -s bolero.rahul.net

   This used to work as is (with no .fetchmailrc file in root's home
   directory) with the last version I had (1.7 or 1.8, I don't remember).
   But with 2.0, it RECPs all mail to the local root user, unless I
   create a .fetchmailrc in root's home directory containing:
   
     skip bolero.rahul.net proto POP3
          user itz is itz

   It won't work if the second line is just "user itz". This is silly.
   
   It seems fetchmail decides to RECP the `default local user' (i.e. the
   uid running fetchmail) unless there are local aliases, and the
   `default' aliases (itz->itz) don't count. They should.
   
   Answer:
   
   No they shouldn't. I thought about this for a while, and I don't much
   like the conclusion I reached, but it's unavoidable. The problem is
   that fetchmail has no way to know, in general, that a local user `itz'
   actually exists.
   
   "Ah!" you say, "Why doesn't it check the password file to see if the
   remote name matches a local one?" Well, there are two reasons.
   
   One: it's not always possible. Suppose you have an SMTP host declared
   that's not the machine fetchmail is running on? You lose.
   
   Two: How do you know server itz and SMTP-host itz are the same person?
   They might not be, and fetchmail shouldn't assume they are unless
   local-itz can explicitly produce credentials to prove it (that is, the
   server-itz password in local-itz's .fetchmailrc file.).
   
   Once you start running down possible failure modes and thinking about
   ways to tinker with the mapping rules, you'll quickly find that all
   the alternatives to the present default are worse or unacceptably more
   complicated or both.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
C2. How can I arrange for a fetchmail daemon to get killed when I log out?

   The easiest way to dispatch fetchmail on logout (which will work
   reliably only if you have just one login going at any time) is to
   arrange for the command `fetchmail -q' to be called on logout. Under
   bash, you can arrange this by putting `fetchmail -q' in the file
   `~/.bash_logout'. Most csh variants execute `~/.logout' on logout. For
   other shells, consult your shell manual page.
   
   Automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail is a little harder to arrange
   if you may have multiple login sessions going. In the contrib
   subdirectory of the fetchmail distribution there is some shell code
   you can add to your .bash_login and .bash_logout profiles that will
   accomplish this. Thank James Laferriere <babydr@nwrain.net> for it.
   
   Some people start up and shut down fetchmail using the ppp-up and
   ppp-down scripts of pppd.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
C3. How do I know what interface and address to use with --interface?

   This depends a lot on your local networking configuration (and right
   now you can't use it at all except under Linux and the newer BSDs).
   However, here are some important rules of thumb that can help. If they
   don't work, ask your local sysop or your Internet provider.
   
   First, you may not need to use --interface at all. If your machine
   only ever does SLIP or PPP to one provider, it's almost certainly by a
   point to point modem connection to your provider's local subnet that's
   pretty secure against snooping (unless someone can tap your phone or
   the provider's local subnet!). Under these circumstances, specifying
   an interface address is fairly pointless.
   
   What the option is really for is sites that use more than one
   provider. Under these circumstances, typically one of your provider IP
   addresses is your mailserver (reachable fairly securely via the modem
   and provider's subnet) but the others might ship your packets
   (including your password) over unknown portions of the general
   Internet that could be vulnerable to snooping. What you'll use
   --interface for is to make sure your password only goes over the one
   secure link.
   
   To determine the device:
   
    1. If you're using a SLIP link, the correct device is probably sl0.
    2. If you're using a PPP link, the correct device is probably ppp0.
    3. If you're using a direct connection over a local network such as
       an ethernet, use the command `netstat -r' to look at your routing
       table. Try to match your mailserver name to a destination entry;
       if you don't see it in the first column, use the `default' entry.
       The device name will be in the rightmost column.
       
   To determine the address and netmask:
   
    1. If you're talking to slirp, the correct address is probably
       10.0.2.15, with no netmask specified. (It's possible to configure
       slirp to present other addresses, but that's the default.)
    2. If you have a static IP address, run `ifconfig <device>', where
       <device> is whichever one you've determined. Use the IP address
       given after "inet addr:". That is the IP address for your end of
       the link, and is what you need. You won't need to specify a
       netmask.
    3. If you have a dynamic IP address, your connection IP will vary
       randomly over some given range (that is, some number of the least
       significant bits change from connection to connection). You need
       to declare an address with the variable bits zero and a
       complementary netmask that sets the range.
       
   To illustrate the rule for dynamic IP addresses, let's suppose you're
   hooked up via SLIP and your IP provider tells you that the dynamic
   address pool is 255 addresses ranging from 205.164.136.1 to
   205.164.136.255. Then
   
        interface "sl0/205.164.136.0/255.255.255.0"

   would work. To range over any value of the last two octets (65536
   addresses) you would use
   
        interface "sl0/205.164.0.0/255.255.0.0"
     _________________________________________________________________
   
C4. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam features?

   This answer covers versions of sendmail from 8.8.7 (the version
   installed in Red Hat 5.1) upwards. If you have an older version,
   upgrade to sendmail 8.9.
   
   Stock sendmails can now do anti-spam exclusions based on a database of
   filter rules. The human-readable form of the database is at
   /etc/mail/deny. The database itself is at /etc/mail/deny.db.
   
   The table itself uses email addresses, domain names, and network
   numbers as keys. For example,
spammer@aol.com         REJECT
cyberspammer.com        REJECT
192.168.212             REJECT

   would refuse mail from spammer@aol.com, any user from cyberspammer.com
   (or any host within the cyberspammer.com domain), and any host on the
   192.168.212.* network. (This feature can be used to do other things as
   well; see the sendmail documentation for details)
   To actually set up the database, run
makemap hash deny <deny

   in /etc/mail.
   
   To test, send a message to your mailing address from that host and
   then pop off the message with fetchmail, using the -v argument. You
   can monitor the SMTP transaction, and when the FROM address is parsed,
   if sendmail sees that it is an address in spamlist, fetchmail will
   flush and delete it.
   
   Under no circumstances put your mailhost or any host you accept mail
   from using fetchmail into your reject file. You will lose mail if you
   do this!!!
     _________________________________________________________________
   
C5. How can I poll some of my mailboxes more/less often than others?

   Use the interval keyword on the ones that should be checked less
   often. For example, if you do a poll every 5 minutes, and want to poll
   some mailboxes every 5 minutes and some every 30 minutes, use
   something like this:
   
poll mainsite.example.com  proto pop3 user ....
poll secondary.example.com proto pop3 interval 6 user ...

   Then secondary.example.com will be polled every 6th time that
   mainsite.example.com is polled, which with a polling interval of every
   5 minutes means that secondary.example.com will be polled every 30
   minutes.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
Fetchmail works OK started up manually, but not from an init script.

   Often, startup scripts have a different environment than an
   interactive login shell. For instance, $HOME might point to "/root"
   when you are logged in as root, but it might be either unset, or set
   to "/" when the startup scripts are running. That means fetchmail at
   startup can't find the .fetchmailrc.
   
   Pick a location (such as /etc/fetchmailrc) and use fetchmail's -f
   option to point fetchmail at it. That should solve the problem.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
C7. How can I forward mail to another host?

   To forward mail to a host other than the one you are running fetchmail
   on, use the smtphost option. See the manual page for details.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
T1. How can I use fetchmail with sendmail?

   For most sendmails, no special configuration is required. Eric Allman
   tells me that if FEATURE(always_add_domain) is included in sendmail's
   configuration, you can leave the rewrite option off.
   
   If your sendmail complains ``sendmail does not relay'', make sure your
   sendmail,cf file says Cwlocalhost so that sendmail recognizes
   `localhost' as a name of its host.
   
   If you're mailing from another machine on your local network, also
   ensure that its IP address is listed in ip_allow or name in name_allow
   (usually in /etc/mail/)
   
   If you find that your sendmail doesn't like the address
   `FETCHMAIL-DAEMON@localhost' (which is used in the bouncemail that
   fetchmail generates), you may have to set
   FEATURE(accept_unqualified_senders).
   
   Günther Leber reports that Digital Unix sendmails won't work with
   fetchmail. The symptom is an error message "553 Local configuration
   error, hostname not recognized as local". The problem is that
   fetchmail normally feeds sendmail with the client machine's host
   address in the MAIL FROM line. These sendmails think this means
   they're seeing the result of a mail loop and suppress the mail. You
   may be able to work around this by running in --invisible mode.
   
   If you want to support multidrop mode, and you can get access to your
   mailserver's sendmail.cf file, it's a good idea to add this rule:
   
H?l?Delivered-To: $u

   and declare `envelope "Delivered-To:"'. This will cause the
   mailserver's sendmail to reliably write the appropriate envelope
   address into each message before fetchmail sees it, and tell fetchmail
   which header it is. With this change, multidrop mode should work
   reliably even when the Received header omits the envelope address
   (which will typically be the case when the message has multiple
   recipients).
   
   Martijn Lievart has a more detailed recipe in the contrib subdirectory
   of the fetchmail source distribution.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
T2. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?

   Turn on the forcecr option; qmail's listener mode doesn't like header
   or message lines terminated with bare linefeeds.
   
   (This information is thanks to Robert de Bath
   <robert@mayday.cix.co.uk>.)
   
   If a mailhost is using the qmail package (see
   http://pobox.com/~djb/qmail.html) then, providing the local hosts are
   also using qmail, it is possible to set up one fetchmail link to be
   reliably collect the mail for an entire domain.
   
   One of the basic features of qmail is the `Delivered-To:' message
   header. Whenever qmail delivers a message to a local mailbox it puts
   the username and hostname of the envelope recipient on this line. The
   major reason for this is to prevent mail loops.
   
   To set up qmail to batch mail for a disconnected site the ISP-mailhost
   will have normally put that site in its `virtualhosts' control file so
   it will add a prefix to all mail addresses for this site. This results
   in mail sent to 'username@userhost.userdom.dom.com' having a
   'Delivered-To:' line of the form:
   
       Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.userdom.dom.com

   A single host maildrop will be slightly simpler:
       Delivered-To: mbox-userstr-username@userhost.dom.com

   The ISP can make the 'mbox-userstr-' prefix anything they choose but a
   string matching the user host name is likely.
   
   To use this line you must:
   
    1. Ensure the option `envelope Delivered-To:' is in the fetchmail
       config file.
    2. Ensure you have a localdomains containing 'userdom.dom.com' or
       `userhost.dom.com' respectively.
       
   So far this reliably delivers messages to the correct machine of the
   local network, to deliver to the correct user the 'mbox-userstr-'
   prefix must be stripped off of the user name. This can be done by
   setting up an alias within the qmail MTA on each local machine. Simply
   create a dot-qmail file called '.qmail-mbox-userstr-default' in the
   alias directory (normally /var/qmail/alias) with the contents:
   
      | ../bin/qmail-inject -a -f"$SENDER" "${LOCAL#mbox-userstr-}@$HOST"

   Note this does require a modern /bin/sh.
   
   Peter Wilson adds:
   
   ``My ISP uses "alias-unzzippedcom-" as the prefix, which means that I
   need to name my file ".qmail-unzzippedcom-default". This is due to
   qmail's assumption that a message sent to user-xyz is handled by the
   file ~user/.qmail-xyz (or ~user/.qmail-default).''
   
   Luca Olivetti adds:
   
   If you aren't using qmail locally, or you don't want to set up the
   alias mechanism described above, you can use the option `qvirtual
   "mbox-userstr-"' in your fetchmail config file to strip the prefix
   from the local user name.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
T3. How can I use fetchmail with exim?

   If you have rewrite on:
   
   There is an RFC1123 requirement that MAIL FROM and RCPT TO addresses
   you pass to it have to be canonical (e.g. with a fully qualified
   hostname part). Therefore fetchmail tries to pass fully qualified RCPT
   TO addresses. But exim does not by default accept `localhost' as a
   fully qualified domain. This can be fixed.
   
   In exim.conf, add `localhost' to your local_domains declaration if
   it's not already present. For example, the author's site at
   thyrsus.com would have a line reading:
   
       local_domains = thyrsus.com:localhost

   If you have rewrite off:
   
   MAIL FROM is a potential problem if the MTAs upstream from your
   fetchmail don't necessarily pass canonicalized From and Return-Path
   addresses, and fetchmail's rewrite option is off. The specific case
   where this has come up involves bounce messages generated by sendmail
   on your mailer host, which have the (un-canonicalized) origin address
   MAILER-DAEMON.
   
   The right way to fix this is to enable the rewrite option and have
   fetchmail canonicalize From and Return-Path addresses with the
   mailserver hostname before exim sees them. This option is enabled by
   default, so it won't be off unless you turned it off.
   
   If you must run with rewrite off, there is a switch in exim's
   configuration files that allows it to accept domainless MAIL FROM
   addresses; you will have to flip it by putting the line
   
        sender_unqualified_hosts = localhost

   in the main section of the exim configuration file. Note that this
   will result in such messages having an incorrect domain name attached
   to their return address (your SMTP listener's hostname rather than
   that of the remote mail server).
     _________________________________________________________________
   
T4. How can I use fetchmail with smail?

   Smail 3.2 is very nearly plug-compatible with sendmail, and may work
   fine out of the box.
   
   We have one report that when processing multiple messages from a
   single fetchmail session, smail sometimes delivers them in an order
   other than received-date order. This can be annoying because it
   scrambles conversational threads. This is not fetchmail's problem, it
   is an smail `feature' and has been reported to the maintainers as a
   bug.
   
   Very recent smail versions require an -smtp_hello_verify option in the
   smail config file. This overrides smail's check to see that the HELO
   address is actually that of the client machine, which is never going
   to be the case when fetchmail is in the picture. According to RFC1123
   an SMTP listener must allow this mismatch, so smail's new behavior
   (introduced sometime between 3.2.0.90 and 3.2.0.95) is a bug.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
T5. How can I use fetchmail with SCO's MMDF?

   MMDF itself is difficult to configure, but it turns out that
   connecting fetchmail to MMDF's SMTP channel isn't that hard. You can
   read an MMDF recipe that describes replacing a UUCP link with
   fetchmail feeding MMDF.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
T6. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?

   The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should convert \n
   to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and correct-for-RFC822
   ones. Use `forcecr'.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper?

   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 IMAP instead if at all possible.
   If you must talk to qpopper, here are some problems to be aware of:
   
  Problems with retrieving large messages from qpopper 2.53
  
   Tony Tang <tony@atn.com.hk> 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.
   
   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 upgrading to qpopper 3.0b1.
   
  Bad interaction with fetchmail 4.4.2 to 4.4.7
  
   Versions of fetchmail from 4.4.2 through 4.4.7 had a bad interaction
   with Eudora qpopper versions 2.3 and later. See X5 for details. The
   solution is to upgrade your fetchmail.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S2. How can I use fetchmail with Microsoft Exchange?

   Fetchmail now supports the proprietary NTLM mode used with M$ Exchange
   servers. To enable this, configure fetchmail with the --enable-NTLM
   option and recompile it. Note: if you 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.
   
   M$ Exchange violates the POP3 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).
   
   Fetchmail works with M$ 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).
   
   Somewhat belatedly, I've learned that there's supposed to be a
   registry bit that can fix this breakage:
   
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
System\Pop3 Compatibility

   This is a bitmask that controls the variations from the standard
   protocol. The bits defined are:
   
   0x00000001:
          Report exact message sizes for the LIST command
          
   0x00000002:
          Allow arbitrary linear whitespace between commands and
          arguments
          
   0x00000004:
          Enable the LAST command
          
   0x00000008:
          Allow an empty PASS command (needed for users with blank
          passwords, but illegal in the protocol)
          
   0x00000010:
          Relax the length restrictions for arguments to commands
          (protocol requires 40, but some user names may be longer than
          that).
          
   0x00000020:
          Allow spaces in the argument to the USER command.
          
   There's another one that may be useful to know about:
   
KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MsExchangeIs\Parameters
System\Pop3 Performance

   0x00000001:
          Render messages to a temporary stream instead of sending
          directly from the database (should always be on)
          
   0x00000002: Flag unrenderable messages (instead of just failing
          commands) (should only be on if you are seeing the problems
          reported in KB Q168109)
          
   0x00000004:
          Return from the QUIT command before all messages have been
          deleted.
          
   The Microsoft pod-person who revealed this information to me admitted
   that he couldn't find it anywhere in their public knowledge base.
   
   Another specific problem we have seen with Exchange servers has as its
   symptom a response to LOGIN that says "NO Ambiguous Alias". Grant
   Edwards writes: This means that Exchange Server is too f*&#ing 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 name
   from your username.
   
   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.
   
   You've got several options:
     * Try giving fetchmail a username of
       "/NTDomain/NTUsername/MailboxName".
     * Get your administrator to configure the server so that usernames
       and mailbox names are the same.
     * Get your administrator to add an alias that maps your username
       explicitly to your mailbox name.
       
   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.
   
   I'll provide the CD.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S3. How can I use fetchmail with CompuServe RPA?

   First, make sure your fetchmail has the RPA support compiled in. Stock
   fetchmail binaries (such as you might get from an RPM) don't. You can
   check this by looking at the output of fetchmail -V; if you see the
   string "+RPA" after the version ID you're good to go, otherwise you'll
   have to build your own from sources (see the INSTALL file in the
   source distribution for directions).
   
   Give your CompuServe pass-phrase in lower case as your password. Add
   `@compuserve.com' to your user ID so that it looks like `user
   <UserID>@compuserve.com', where <UserID> can be either your numerical
   userID or your E-mail nickname. An RPA-enabled fetchmail will
   automatically check for csi.com in the POP server's greeting line. If
   that's found, and your user ID ends with `@compuserve.com', it will
   query the server to see if it is RPA-capable, and if so do an RPA
   transaction rather than a plain-text password handshake.
   
   Warning: the debug (-v -v) output of fetchmail will show your
   pass-phrase in Unicode!
   
   These two .fetchmailrc entries show the difference between an RPA and
   non-RPA configuration:
# This version will use RPA
poll csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
    user "CSERVE_USER@compuserve.com" there with password "CSERVE_PASSWORD"
        is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr

# This version will not use RPA
poll non-rpa.csi.com via "pop.site1.csi.com" with proto POP3 and options no dns
    user "CSERVE_USER" there with password "CSERVE_POP3_PASSWORD"
       is LOCAL_USER here options fetchall stripcr
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S4. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?

  Single-drop mode
  
   You can get fetchmail to download the email for just one user from
   Demon Internet's POP3 server by giving it a username consisting of
   your Demon user name followed by your account name, with an at-sign
   between them.
   
   For example, to download email for the user
   <philh@vision25.demon.co.uk>, you could use the following .fetchmailrc
   file:
   
set postmaster "philh"
poll pop3.demon.co.uk with protocol POP3:
    user "philh@vision25" is philh

  Multi-drop mode
  
   Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3. All
   messages have a Received: header added when they enter the maildrop,
   like this:
   Received: from punt-1.mail.demon.net by mailstore for fred@xyz.demon.co.uk
             id 899963657:10:27896:0; Thu, 09 Jul 98 05:54:17 GMT

   To enable multi-drop mode you need to tell fetchmail that 'mailstore'
   is the name of the host which accepted the mail, and let it know the
   hostname part(s) of your E-mail address. The following example assumes
   that your hostname is xyz.demon.co.uk, and that you have also bought
   "mail forwarding" for the domain my-company.co.uk (in which case your
   MTA must also be configured to accept mail sent to
   user@my-company.co.uk)
     poll pop3.demon.co.uk proto pop3 aka mailstore no dns:
       localdomains xyz.demon.co.uk my-company.co.uk
       user xyz is * fetchall

   The `fetchall' command ensures that all mail is downloaded. If you
   want to leave mail on the server use `uidl' and `keep'; Demon does not
   implement the obsolete `top' command, because SDPS combines messages
   residing on two separate punt clusters into a single POP3 maildrop. If
   you do use UIDL, be aware that the "user@host" form for fetching mail
   from a particular Demon host will confuse fetchmail's UIDL code; use
   user+host.
   
   Note that Demon may delete mail on the server which is more than 30
   days old; see their POP3 page for details.
   
  The SDPS extension
  
   There's a different way to do multidrop. It's not necessary on Demon
   Internet, since fetchmail can parse Received addresses, but the person
   who implemented this didn't know that. It may be useful if Demon
   Internet ever changes mail transports.
   
   SDPS includes a non-standard extension for retrieving the envelope of
   a message (*ENV), which fetchmail optionally supports if compiled with
   the --enable-SDPS option. If you have it, the first line of the
   fetchmail -V response will include the string "+SDPS".
   
   Once you have SDPS compiled in, fetchmail in POP3 mode will
   automatically detect when it's talking to a Demon Internet host in
   multidrop mode, and use the *ENV extension to get an envelope To
   address.
   
   The autodetection works by looking at the hostname in the POP3
   greeting line; if you're accessing Demon Internet through a proxy it
   may fail. To force SDPS mode, pick "sdps" as your protocol.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S5. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?

   Enable `fetchall'. A user reports that the 2.2 version of USA.NET's
   POP server reports that you must use the `fetchall' option to make
   sure that all of the mail is retrieved, otherwise some may be left on
   the server. This is almost certainly a server bug.
   
   The usa.net servers (at least in their 2.2 version, June 1998) don't
   handle the TOP command properly, either. Regardless of the argument
   you give it, they retrieve only about 10 lines of the message.
   Fetchmail normally uses TOP for message retrieval in order to avoid
   marking messages seen, but `fetchall' forces it to use RETR instead.
   
   (Note: Other failure modes have been reported on usa.net's servers.
   They seem to be chronically flaky. We recommend finding another
   provider.)
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S6. How can I use fetchmail with HP OpenMail?

   No special configuration is required, but OpenMail versions prior to
   6.0 have an annoying bug similar to the big one in Microsoft Exchange.
   The message sizes it gives in 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.
   
   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 6.0.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S8. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?

   You can't, yet. But Hugo Rabson has written a script called `hotmole'
   that can retrieve Hotmail mail via the web using Lynx. The script was
   available on Hugo Rabson's Linux page, but we're told that project is
   dead and the web page seems to be gone.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S9. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?

   You can't. MSN uses something that looks like POP3, except the
   authentication part is nonstandard. And of course they don't document
   it, so nobody but their Windows clients can speak it.
   
   This is a customer lock-in tactic; we recommend boycotting MSN as the
   only appropriate response.
   
   As of 5.0.8, we have support for the client side of NTLM
   authentication. It's possible this may enable fetchmail to talk to
   MSN; if so, somebody should report it so this FAQ can be corrected.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S10. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?

   The SpryNet POP3 servers mark a message queried with TOP as seen. This
   means that if your connection drops in mid-message, it may end up
   invisibly stuck on your mail spool. Use the fetchall flag to ensure
   that it's recovered on the next cycle.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S11. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?

   The FTGate V2 server (and possibly older versions as well) has a weird
   bug. It answers OK twice to a TOP request! Use the fetchall option to
   force use of RETR and work around this bug.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S12. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?

   You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see attachments.
   MailMax has a bug; it reports the message length with attachments but
   doesn't download them on TOP or RETR.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S13. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?

   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.
   
   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.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S14. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?

   You can't. At least not if you want to be able to see attachments.
   InterChange has a bug similar to the MailMax server; it reports the
   message length with attachments but doesn't download them on TOP or
   RETR.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?

   Daniel Sobral <dcs@gns.com.br gave us the following recipe:
   
    1. Install socks5. You don't need to have a socks server, you just
       want the "runsocks" program.
    2. Set the environment variable SOCKS_SERVER to the server you'll be
       using. Alternatively, you may set SOCKS4_SERVER and/or
       SOCKS5_SERVER. E.g.:
        export SOCKS5_SERVER=socks.my.domain.com
    3. Set SOCKS5_USER and SOCKS5_PASSWD if needed.
    4. Run fetchmail through runsocks. Just like this:
        runsocks fetchmail [parameters to fetchmail]
       
   It wasn't that hard, was it? :-)
   
   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 library
   and set the makefile up to link it. You can also specify a directory
   containing the Rconnect library.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
S7. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?

   Nathan Cutler reports that the the mail.geocities.com POP3 servers
   fail to include the first Received line of the message in the send to
   fetchmail. This can solve problems if your MUA interprets Received
   continuations as body lines and doesn't parse any of the following
   headers.
   
   Workaround is to use "mda" keyword or "-mda" switch:
mda "sed -e '1s/^\t/Received: /' | formail | /usr/bin/procmail -d <user>"

   Replace \t with exactly one tabulation character. You should also
   consider using "fetchall" option because Geocities' servers sometimes
   think that the first 45 messages have already been read.
   
   Fix: Get an email provider that doesn't suck. The pop-up ads on
   Geocities are lame, you should boycott them anyway.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
K2. How can I use fetchmail with IPv6 and IPsec?

   To use fetchmail with IPv6, you need a system that supports IPv6, the
   "Basic Socket Interface Extensions for IPv6" (RFC 2133). This
   currently means that you need to have a BSD/OS or NetBSD system with
   the NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution or a Linux system with the
   latest experimental kernel and net-tools. It should not be hard to
   build fetchmail on other IPv6 implementations if you can port the
   inet6-apps kit.
   
   To use fetchmail with networking security (read: IPsec), you need a
   system that supports IPsec, the API described in the "Network Security
   API for Sockets" (draft-metz-net-security-api-01.txt), and the
   inet6-apps kit. This currently means that you need to have a BSD/OS or
   NetBSD system with the NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution. A Linux
   IPsec implementation supporting this API will probably appear in the
   coming months.
   
   The NRL IPv6+IPsec software distribution can be obtained from:
   http://web.mit.edu/network/isakmp
   
   The inet6-apps kit can be obtained from
   ftp://ftp.ipv6.inner.net/pub/ipv6 (via IPv6) or
   ftp://ftp.inner.net/pub/ipv6 (via IPv4).
   
   More information on using IPv6 with Linux can be obtained from:
     * http://www.bieringer.de/linux/IPv6/IPv6-HOWTO/IPv6-HOWTO.html
     * http://www.ipv6.inner.net/ipv6 (via IPv6)
     * http://www.inner.net/ipv6 (via IPv4)
     _________________________________________________________________
   
K3. How can I get fetchmail to work with ssh?

   We have three recipes for this. The first is easy to set up, but only
   supports one user at a time.
   
  Single-User POP3
  
   First, a lightly edited version of a recipe from Masafumi NAKANE:
   
   1. You must have ssh (the ssh client) on the local host and sshd (ssh
   server) on the remote mail server. And you have to configure ssh so
   you can login to the sshd server host without a password. (Refer to
   ssh man page for several authentication methods.)
   
   2. Add something like following to your .fetchmailrc file:
   
poll mailhost port 1234 via localhost with proto pop3:
        preconnect "ssh -f -L 1234:mailhost:110 mailhost
        </dev/null >/dev/null; sleep 5";

   The sleep is needed on slower machines to prevent fetchmail from
   trying to open the socket before ssh actually makes it ready. Faster
   machines may not need it.
   
   (Note that 1234 can be an arbitrary port number. Privileged ports can
   be specified only by root.) The effect of this ssh command is to
   forward connections made to localhost port 1234 (in above example) to
   mailhost's 110.
   
   This configuration will enable secure mail transfer. All the
   conversation between fetchmail and remote pop server will be
   encrypted.
   
   If sshd is not running on the remote mail server, you can specify
   intermediate host running it. If you do this, however, communication
   between the machine running sshd and the POP server will not be
   encrypted. And the preconnect line would be like this:
   
preconnect "ssh -f -L 1234:mailhost:110 sshdhost sleep 20 </dev/null >/dev/null
"

   You can work this trick with IMAP too, but the port number 110 in the
   above would need to become 143. In either case you'll have to specify
   a password but the password will not be sent in clear.
   
   There is an explanation of a similar recipe at Secure POP via SSH
   mini-HOWTO.
   
  Multi-User POP3
  
   Second, a recipe from Charlie Brady <cbrady@ind.tansu.com.au>:
   
   Charlie says: "The recipe [from Masafume NAKANE] certainly works, but
   the solution I post here is better in a few respects":
     * this method will not fail if two or more users attempt to use
       fetchmail simultaneously.
     * you are able to use the full facilities of tcpd to control access
     * this method does not depend on the preconnect feature of
       fetchmail, so can be used for tunneling of other services as well.
       
   Here are the steps:
    1. Make sure that the "socket" program is installed on the server
       machine. Presently it lives at
       ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/linux/system/network/misc/socket-1.1.tar
       .gz, but watch out for a change in version number.
    2. Set up an unprivileged account on your system with a .ssh
       directory containing an SSH identity file "identity" with no pass
       phrase, "identity.pub" and "known_hosts" containing the host key
       of your mailhost. Let's call this account "noddy".
    3. On mailhost, set up no-password access for noddy@yourhost. Add to
       your SSH authorized_keys file:
command="socket localhost 110",no-port-forwarding 1024 ......
       where "1024 ......" is the content of noddy's identity.pub file.
    4. Create a script /usr/local/bin/ssh.fm and make it executable:
#! /bin/sh
exec ssh -q -C -l your.login.id -e none mailhost socket localhost 110
    5. Add an entry in inetd.conf for whatever port you choose to use -
       say:
1234 stream tcp nowait noddy /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/bin/ssh.fm
    6. Send a HUP signal to your inetd.
       
   Now just use localhost:1234 to access your POP server.
   
  Multi-User IMAP
  
   This is the preferred method. It comes to us from Joerg Dorchain. The
   basic idea is to set up a bidirectional encrypted socket connection:
   
fetchmail <--> ssh <---> sshd <--> imapd
 \---local side--/       \-remote side-/

   Use ssh-keygen(1) to set up a special ssh identity with no password
   and RSA-only authentication, which executes /usr/sbin/imapd when
   authenticated. For security reasons all other commands should be
   disabled. (There is some security exposure in using an identity
   without a passphrase; it means anyone who can get access to your
   account could use it to read your mail).
   
   Running ssh-keygen will generate two files. Have it create the private
   key to ~/.ssh/identity-imap. Once you have generated the corresponding
   public key, prepend this to the line of key data in it:
command="/usr/sbin/imapd",no-port-forwarding,no-agent-forwarding

   This identity data has to be appended to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on the
   remote machine, as usual for RSA authentication. Whenever your ssh
   uses this identity, the remote side will run imapd. The imapd will see
   that it is not running as root and go into preauthenticated mode.
   
   On the client side, use the plugin keyword to make fetchmail talk to
   the stdin of the remote ssh. Here's an examople:
poll mail.dorchain.net options proto imap plugin fetchmail-imap-wrapper

   The wrapper script should look like this:
   
#!/bin/sh
exec ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/identity-imap $1 /usr/sbin/imapd
     _________________________________________________________________
   
K4. What do I have to do to use the IMAP-GSS protocol?

   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 ftp.cac.washington.edu) 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.
   
   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 athena-dist.mit.edu but mind the export
   restrictions). If you have these, compiling in GSS support is simple:
   add a
--with-gssapi=[/path/to/krb5/root]

   option to configure. For instance, I have all of my Kerberos V
   libraries installed under /usr/krb5 so I run
configure --with-gssapi=/usr/krb5

   Setting up Kerberos V authentication is beyond the scope of this FAQ
   (you may find Jim Rome's paper How to Kerberize your site helpful),
   but you'll at least need to add a credential for imap/[mailhost] to
   the keytab of the mail server (IMAP doesn't just use the host key).
   Then you'll need to have your credentials ready on your machine (cf.
   kinit).
   
   After that things are very simple. Set your protocol to imap-gss in
   your .fetchmailrc, and omit the password, since imap-gss doesn't need
   one. You can specify a username if you want, but this is only useful
   if your mailbox belongs to a username different from your Kerberos
   principal.
   
   Now you don't have to worry about your password appearing in cleartext
   in your .fetchmailrc, or across the network.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
K5. How can I use fetchmail with SSL?

   You'll need to have the OpenSSL libraries installed. Configure with
   --with-ssl. If you have the OpenSSL libraries installed in the default
   location (/usr/local/ssl) 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.
   
   Fetchmail binaries built this way support ssl, sslkey, and sslcert
   options that control SSL encryption. You will need to have an
   SSL-enabled mailserver to use these options. See the manual page for
   detals.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R1. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed' messages.

   Fetchmail itself is probably working, but your SMTP port 25 listener
   is down or inaccessible.
   
   The first thing to check is if you can telnet to port 25 on your smtp
   host (which is normally `localhost' unless you've specified an smtp
   option in your .fetchmailrc or on the command line) and get a greeting
   line from the listener. If the SMTP host is inaccessible or the
   listener is down, fix that first.
   
   If the listener seems to be up when you test with telnet, the most
   benign and typical problem is that the listener had a momentary
   seizure due to resource exhaustion while fetchmail was polling it --
   process table full or some other problem that stopped the listener
   process from forking. If your SMTP host is not `localhost' or
   something else in /etc/hosts, the fetchmail glitch could also have
   been caused by transient nameserver failure.
   
   Try running fetchmail -v again; if it succeeds, you had one of these
   kinds of transient glitch. You can ignore these hiccups, because a
   future fetchmail run will get the mail through.
   
   If the listener tests up, but you have chronic failures trying to
   connect to it anyway, your problem is more serious. One way to work
   around chronic SMTP connect problems is to use --mda. But this only
   attacks the symptom; you may have a DNS or TCP routing problem. You
   should really try to figure out what's going on underneath before it
   bites you some other way.
   
   We have one report (from toby@eskimo.com) that you can sometimes solve
   such problems by doing an smtp declaration with an IP address that
   your routing table maps to something other than the loopback device
   (he used ppp0).
   
   We also have a report that this error can be caused by having an
   /etc/hosts file that associates your client host name with more than
   one IP address.
   
   It's also possible that your DNS configuration isn't looking at
   /etc/hosts at all. If you're using libc5, look at /etc/resolv.conf; it
   should say something like
        order hosts,bind

   so your /etc/hosts file is checked first. If you're running GNU libc6,
   check your /etc/nsswitch.conf file. Make sure it says something like
        hosts:  files dns

   again, in order to make sure /etc/hosts is seen first.
   
   If you have a hostname set for your machine, and this hostname does
   not appear in /etc/hosts, you will be able to telnet to port 25 and
   even send a mail with rcpt to: user@host-not-in-/etc/hosts, but
   fetchmail can't seem to get in touch with sendmail, no matter what you
   set smtpaddress to.
   
   We had another report from a Linux user of fetchmail 2.1 who solved
   his SMTP connection problem by removing the reference to -lresolv from
   his link line and relinking. Apparently in some older Linux
   distributions the libc bind library version works better.
   
   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 particular cause should go away.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R2. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.

   (I hear this one from people who have run into the blank-line problem
   in X1.)
   
   Try sending yourself test mail and retrieving it using the
   command-line options `-k -m cat'. This will dump exactly what
   fetchmail retrieves to standard output (plus the Received line
   fetchmail itself adds to the headers).
   
   If the dump doesn't match what shows up in your mailbox when you
   configure an MDA, your MDA is mangling the message. If it doesn't
   match what you sent, then fetchmail or something on the server is
   broken.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R3. Fetchmail dumps core when given an invalid rc file.

   This is usually reported from AIX or Ultrix, but has even been known
   to happen on Linuxes without a recent version of flex installed. The
   problem appears to be a result of building with an archaic version of
   lex.
   
   Workaround: fix the syntax of your .fetchmailrc file.
   
   Fix: build and install the latest version of flex from the Free
   Software Foundation. An FSF mirror site will help you get it faster.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.

   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.
   
   Workaround: link with GNU malloc rather than the stock C library
   malloc.
   
   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).
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R5. Running fetchmail in daemon mode doesn't work.

   We have one report from a SunOS 4.1.4 user that trying to run
   fetchmail in detached daemon mode doesn't work, but that using the
   same options with -N (nodetach) is OK.
   
   If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with the code
   in daemon.c that detaches and backgrounds the daemon fetchmail. Tell
   me about it so I can try to fix it. As a workaround, you can start
   fetchmail with -N and an ampersand to background it. A Sun user
   recommends this:
   

(fetchmail --nodetach &lt;other params&gt; &amp;)

   The extra pair of parens is significant --- it makes sure that the
   process detaches from the initial shell (one more shell is started and
   dies immediately, detaching fetchmail and making it child of PID 1).
   This is important when you start fetchmail interactively and than quit
   interactive shell. The line above makes sure fetchmail lives after
   that!
   
   This should not happen under Linux or any truly POSIX-conformant Unix.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R6. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.

   Your problem may be with pppd's `demand' option. We have a report that
   fetchmail doesn't play well with it, but works with pppd if `demand'
   is turned off. We have no idea why this is.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R7. Fetchmail randomly dies with socket errors.

   Check the MTU value in your PPP interface reported by /sbin/ifconfig.
   If it's over 600, change it in your PPP options file.
   (/etc/ppp/options on my box). Here are option values that work:
   
  mtu 552
  mru 552
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   R8. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade In
   RH 6.0, the HOME value in the boot-time root environment changed from
   /root to / as the result of a change in init. Move your .fetchmailrc
   or use a -f option to explicitly point at the file. (Oddly, a similar
   problem has been reported from Debian systems.)
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R9. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain messages but before deleting
them

   There's a TCP/IP stalling problem under Redhat 6.0 (and possibly other
   recent Linuxes) that can cause this symptom. Brian Boutel writes:
   
     TCP timestamps are turned on on my Linux boxes (I assume it's now
     the default). This uses 12 extra bytes per segment. When the tcp
     connection starts, the other end agrees a MSS of 1460, and then
     fragments 1460 byte chunks into 1448 and 12, because is is not
     allowing for the timestamp.
     
     Then, for reasons I can't explain, it waits a long time (typically
     2 minutes) after the ack is sent before sending the next
     (fragmented) packet. Turning off tcp timestamps avoids the
     fragmentation and restores normal behaviour. To do this, [execute]
     
     echo 0 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/tcp_timestamps
     
     I'm still unclear about the details of why this is happening. At
     least [now] I am now getting good performance and no queue
     blocking.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
R10. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches

   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.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
D1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any mail.

   Maybe you have a .forward or alias set up that you've forgotten about.
   You should probably remove it.
   
   Or maybe you're trying to run fetchmail in multidrop mode as root
   without a .fetchmailrc file. This doesn't do what you think it should;
   see question C1.
   
   Or you may not be connecting to the SMTP listener. Run fetchmail -v
   and see R1.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
D2. All my mail seems to disappear after a dropped connection.

   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)
   
   Many POP servers, if an interruption occurs, will restore the whole
   mail queue after about 10 minutes. Others 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.
   
   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
   --fetchlimit value. This will result in more IP connects to the
   server, but will mean it actually executes changes to the queue more
   often.
   
   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.)
     _________________________________________________________________
   
D3. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems to have
been vanished.

   Fetchmail only sends a delete mail request to the server when either
   (a) it gets a positive delivery acknowledgment from the SMTP listener,
   or (b) it gets an error 571 (the spam-filter error) from the listener.
   No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.
   
   However, IMAP2bis has a design problem in that its normal fetch
   command marks a message `seen' as soon as the fetch command to get it
   is sent down. If for some reason the message isn't actually delivered
   (you take a line hit during the download, or your port 25 listener
   can't find enough free disk space, or you interrupt the delivery in
   mid-message) that `seen' message can lurk invisibly in your server
   mailbox forever.
   
   Workaround: add the `fetchall' keyword to your fetch options.
   
   Solution: switch to an IMAP4 server.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop mail is going to root
anyway.

   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
   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.''
   
   These errors usually indicate some kind of DNS configuration problem
   either on the server or your client machine.
   
   The easiest workaround is to add a `via' option (if necessary) and add
   enough aka declarations to cover all of your mailserver's aliases,
   then say `no dns'. 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).
   
   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.
   
   Occasionally these errors indicate the sort of header-parsing problem
   described in M7.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M2. I can't seem to get fetchmail to route to a local domain properly.

   A lot of people want to use fetchmail as a poor man's internetwork
   mail gateway, picking up mail accumulated for a whole domain in a
   single server mailbox and then routing based on what's in the
   To/Cc/Bcc lines.
   
   In general, this is not really a good idea. It would be smarter to
   just let the mail sit in the mailserver's queue and use fetchmail's
   ETRN mode to trigger SMTP sends periodically (of course, this means
   you have to poll more frequently than the mailserver's expiration
   period). If you can't arrange this, try setting up a UUCP feed.
   
   If neither of these alternatives is available, multidrop mode may do
   (though you are 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
   `localdomains' option.
   
   In general, if you use localdomains you need to make sure of two other
   things:
   
   1. You've actually set up your .fetchmailrc entry to invoke multidrop
   mode.
   
   Many people set a `localdomains' list and then forget that fetchmail
   wants to see more than one name (or the wildcard `*') in a `here' list
   before it will do multidrop routing.
   
   2. You may have to set `no envelope'.
   
   Normally, multidrop mode tries to deduce an envelope address from a
   message before parsing the To/Cc/Bcc lines (this enables it to avoid
   losing to mailing list software that doesn't put a recipient address
   in the To lines).
   
   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 `no envelope' to
   prevent fetchmail from being bamboozled by this.
   
   Check also answer T1 on a reliable way to do multidrop delivery if
   your ISP (or your mail redirection provider) is using qmail.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M3. I tried to run a mailing list using multidrop, and I have a mail loop!

   This isn't fetchmail's fault. Check your mailing list. If the list
   expansion includes yourself or anybody else at your mailserver (that
   is, not on the client side) you've created a mail loop. Just chop the
   host part off any local addresses in the list.
   
   If you use sendmail, you can check the list expansion with sendmail
   -bv.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M4. My multidrop fetchmail seems to be having DNS problems.

   We have one report from a Linux user (not the same one as in R1!) 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.
   
   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.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M5. I'm seeing long DNS delays before each message is processed.

   Use the `aka' option to pre-declare as many of your mailserver's DNS
   names as you can. When an address's host part matches an aka name, no
   DNS lookup needs to be done to check it.
   
   If you're sure you've pre-declared all of your mailserver's DNS names,
   you can use the `no dns' option to prevent other hostname parts from
   being looked up at all.
   
   Sometimes delays are unavoidable. Some SMTP listeners try to call DNS
   on the From-address hostname as a way of checking that the address is
   valid.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M6. How do I get multidrop mode to work with majordomo?

   In order for sendmail to execute the command strings in the majordomo
   alias file, it is necessary for sendmail to think that the mail it
   receives via SMTP really is destined for a local user name. A normal
   virtual-domain setup results in delivery to the default mailbox,
   rather than expansion through majordomo.
   
   Michael <michael@bizsystems.com> gave us a recipe for dealing with
   this case that pairs a run control file like this:
   
poll your.pop3.server proto pop3:
    no envelope no dns
    localdomains virtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
    user yourISPusername is root * here,
    password yourISPpassword fetchall

   with a hack on your local sendmail.cf like this:
   
#############################################
#  virtual info, local hack for ruleset 98  #
#############################################

# domains to treat as direct mapped local domain

CVvirtual.localdomain1.com virtual.localdomain2.com ...
---------------------------
in ruleset 98 add
-------------------------
# handle virtual users

R$+ <@ $=V . >          $: $1 < @ $j . >
R< @ > $+ < @ $=V . >   $: $1 < @ $j . >
R< @ > $+               $: $1
R< error : $- $+ > $*   $#error $@ $1 $: $2
R< $+ > $+ < @ $+ >     $: $>97 $1

   This ruleset just strips virtual domain names off the addresses of
   incoming mail. Your sendmail must be 8.8 or newer for this to work.
   Michael says:
   
     I use this scheme with 2 virtual domains and the default ISP
     user+domain and service about 30 mail accounts + majordomo on my
     inside pop3 server with fetchmail and sendmail 8.83
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M7. Multidrop mode isn't parsing envelope addresses from my Received headers as
it should.

   It may happen that you're getting what appear to be well-formed
   sendmail Received headers, but fetchmail can't seem to extract an
   envelope address from them. There can be a couple of reasons for this.
   
  Spurious Received lines need to be skipped:
  
   First, fetchmail might be looking at the wrong Received header.
   Normally it looks only on the first one it sees, on the theory that
   that one was last added and is going to be the one containing your
   mailserver's theory of who the message was addressed to.
   
   Some (unusual) mailserver configurations will generate extra Received
   lines which you need to skip. To arrange this, use the optional skip
   prefix argument of the `envelope' option; you may need to say
   something like `envelope 1 Received' or `envelope 2 Received'.
   
  The `by' clause doesn't contain a mailserver alias:
  
   When fetchmail parses a Received line that looks like
Received: from send103.yahoomail.com (send103.yahoomail.com [205.180.60.92])
    by iserv.ttns.net (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id RAA10088
    for <ksturgeon@fbceg.org>; Wed, 9 Sep 1998 17:01:59 -0700

   it checks to see if `iserv.ttns.net' is a DNS alias of your mailserver
   before accepting `ksturgeon@fbceg.org' as an envelope address. This
   check might fail if your DNS were misconfigured, or if you were using
   `no dns' and had failed to declare iserv.ttns.net as an alias of your
   server.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
M8. Users are getting multiple copies of messages.

   It's a consequence of multidrop. What's happening is that you have N
   users subscribed to the same list. The list software sends N copies,
   not knowing they will end up in the same multidrop box. Since they are
   both locally addressed to all N users, fetchmail delivers N copies to
   each user.
   
   Fetchmail tries to eliminate adjacent duplicate messages in a
   multidrop mailbox. However, this logic depends on the message-ID being
   identical in both copies. It also depends on the two copies being
   adjacent in the server mailbox. The former is usually the case, but
   the latter condition sometimes fails in a timing-dependent way if the
   server was processing multiple incoming mail streams. I could
   eliminate this problem by keeping a list of all message-IDs received
   during a poll so far and dropping any message that matches a seen mail
   ID. The touble is that this is an O(N**2) operation that might
   significantly slow down the retriweval of large mail batches.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
X1. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.

   What's probably happening is that the POP/IMAP daemon on your
   mailserver is inserting a non-RFC822 header (like X-POP3-Rcpt:) and
   something in your delivery path (most likely an old version of the
   deliver program, which sendmail often calls to do local delivery) is
   failing to recognize it as a header.
   
   This is not fetchmail's problem. The first thing to try is installing
   a current version of deliver. If this doesn't work, try to figure out
   which other program in your mail path is inserting the blank line and
   replace that. If you can't do either of these things, pick a different
   MDA (such as procmail) and declare it with the `mda' option.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
X2. My mail client can't see a Subject line.

   First, see X1. This is quite probably the same problem (X-POP3-Rcpt
   header or something similar being inserted by the server and choked on
   by an old version of deliver).
   
   The O'Reilly sendmail book does warn that IDA sendmail doesn't process
   X- headers correctly. If this is your problem, all I can suggest is
   replacing IDA sendmail, because it's broken and not RFC822 conformant.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
X3. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.

   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 SMTP
   listener or your local delivery agent. Fetchmail cannot split
   messages.
   
   Some POP server daemons ignore Content-Length headers and split
   messages on From lines. We have one report that the 2.1 version of the
   BSD popper program (as distributed on Solaris 2.5 and elsewhere) is
   broken this way.
   
   You can test this. Declare an mda of `cat' and send yourself one piece
   of mail containing "From" at start of a line. If you see a split
   message, your POP/IMAP server is at fault. Upgrade to a more recent
   version.
   
   Sendmail and other SMTP listeners don't split RFC822 messages either.
   What's probably happening is either sendmail's local delivery agent or
   your mail reader are not quite RFC822-conformant and are breaking
   messages on what it thinks are Unix-style From headers. You can figure
   out which by looking at your client-side mailbox with vi or more. If
   the message is already split in your mailbox, your local delivery
   agent is the problem. If it's not, your mailreader is the problem.
   
   If you can't replace the offending program, take a look at your
   sendmail.cf file. There will likely be a line something like
   
Mlocal, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMShP, S=10, R=20/40, A=procmail -Y -d $u

   describing your local delivery agent. Try inserting the `E' option in
   the flags part (the F= string). This will make sendmail turn each
   dangerous start-of-line From into a >From, preventing programs further
   downstream from acting up.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
X4. My mail is being mangled in a new and different way

   The first thing you need to do is pin down what program is doing the
   mangling. We don't like getting bug reports about fetchmail that are
   actually due to some other program's malfeasance, so please go through
   this diagnostic sequence before sending us a complaint.
   
   There are five possible culprits to consider, listed here in the order
   they pass your mail:
   
    1. Programs upstream of your server mailbox.
    2. The POP or IMAP server on your mailserver host.
    3. The fetchmail program itself.
    4. Your local sendmail.
    5. Your LDA (local delivery agent), as called by sendmail or
       specified by mda.
       
   Often it happens that fetchmail itself is OK, but using it exposes
   pre-existing bugs in your downstream software, or your downstream
   software has a bad interaction with POP/IMAP. You need to pin down
   exactly where the message is being garbled in order to deduce what is
   actually going on.
   
   The first thing to do is send yourself a test message, and retrieve it
   with a .fetchmailrc entry containing the following (or by running with
   the equivalent command-line options):
   
    mda "cat >MBOX" keep fetchall

   This will capture what fetchmail gets from the server, except for (a)
   the extra Received header line fetchmail prepends, (b) header address
   changes due to rewrite, and (c) any end-of-line changes due to the
   forcecr and stripcr options. MBOX will in fact contain what programs
   downstream of fetchmail see.
   
   The most common causes of mangling are bugs and misconfigurations in
   those downstream programs. If MBOX looks unmangled, you will know that
   is what is going on and that it is not fetchmail's problem. Take a
   look at the other FAQ items in this section for possible clues about
   how to fix your problem.
   
   If MBOX looks mangled, the next thing to do is compare it with your
   actual server mailbox (if possible). That's why you specified keep, so
   the server copy would not be deleted. If your server mailbox looks
   mangled, programs upstream of your server mailbox are at fault.
   Unfortunately there is probably little you can do about this aside
   from complaining to your site postmaster, and nothing at all fetchmail
   can do about it!
   
   More likely you'll find that the server copy looks OK. In that case
   either the POP/IMAP server or fetchmail is doing the mangling. To
   determine which, you'll need to telnet to the server port and simulate
   a fetchmail session yourself. This is not actually hard (both POP3 and
   IMAP are simple, text-only, line-oriented protocols) but requires some
   attention to detail. You should be able to use a fetchmail -v log as a
   model for a session, but remember that the "*" in your LOGIN or PASS
   command dump has to be replaced with your actual password.
   
   The objective of manually simulating fetchmail is so you can see
   exactly what fetchmail sees. If you see a mangled message, then your
   server is at fault, and you probably need to complain to your
   mailserver administrators. However, we like to know what the broken
   servers are so we can warn people away from them. So please send us a
   transcript of the session including the mangling and the server's
   initial greeting line. Please tell us anything else you think might be
   useful about the server, like the server host's operating system.
   
   If your manual fetchmail simulation shows an unmangled message,
   congratulations. You've found an actual fetchmail bug, which is a
   pretty rare thing these days. Complain to us and we'll fix it. Please
   include the session transcript of your manual fetchmail simulation
   along with the other things described in the FAQ entry on reporting
   bugs.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
X5. Using POP3, retrievals seems to be fetching too much!

   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).
   
   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.
   
   Fix: Upgrade to a later version of fetchmail.
   
   Workaround: set the fetchall option. Under POP3 in these fetchmail
   version only, this had the side effect of forcing RETR use.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O1. The --logfile option doesn't work if the logfile doesn't exist.

   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).
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O2. Every time I get a POP or IMAP message the header is dumped to all my
terminal sessions.

   Fetchmail uses the local sendmail to perform final delivery, which
   Netscape and other clients doesn'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
biff n

   to turn it off. If this doesn't work, try the command
chmod -x `tty`

   which is essentially what biff -n will do. If this doesn't work,
   comment out any reference to ``comsat'' in your /etc/inetd.conf file
   and restart inetd.
   
   In Slackware Linux distributions, the last line in /etc/profile is
biff y

   Change this to
biff n

   to solve the problem system-wide.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O3. Does fetchmail reread its rc file every poll cycle?

   No, but versions 5.2.2 and later will notice when you modify your rc
   file and restart, reading it.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O4. Why do deleted messages show up again when I take a line hit while
downloading?

   Because you're using a POP3 other than Qualcomm qpopper, or an IMAP
   with a long expunge interval.
   
   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:
   
   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.
   
   The other (which we recommend) is to switch to IMAP. IMAP has an
   explicit expunge command and fetchmail normally uses it to delete
   messages immediately after they are downloaded.
   
   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
   interval, the window gets wider. This problem should correct itself
   the next time you complete a successful query.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O5. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From address?

   Because logging is done based on the address indicated by the sending
   SMTP's MAIL FROM, and some listeners are picky about that address.
   
   Some SMTP listeners get upset if you try to hand them a MAIL FROM
   address naming a different host than the originating site for your
   connection. This is a feature, not a bug -- it's supposed to help
   prevent people from forging mail with a bogus origin site. (RFC 1123
   says you shouldn't do this exclusion...)
   
   Since the originating site of a fetchmail delivery connection is
   localhost, this effectively means these picky listeners will barf on
   any MAIL FROM address fetchmail hands them with an @ in it!
   
   Versions 2.1 and up try the header From address first and fall back to
   the calling-user ID. So if your SMTP listener isn't picky, the log
   will look right.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O6. I'm seeing long sendmail delays or hangs near the start of each poll cycle.

   Sendmail does a hostname lookup when it first starts up, and also each
   time it gets a HELO in listener mode.
   
   Your resolver configuration may be causing one of these lookups to
   fail and time out. Check /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/hosts file. Make
   sure your hostname and fully-qualified domain name are both in
   /etc/hosts, 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.
   
   You can suppress the startup-time lookup if need to by reconfiguring
   with FEATURE(nodns).
   
   Configuring your bind library to cache DNS lookups locally may help,
   and is a good idea for speeding up other services as well. Switching
   to a faster MTA like qmail or exim might help.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O7. Why doesn't fetchmail deliver mail in date-sorted order?

   Because that's not the order the server hands it to fetchmail in.
   
   Fetchmail getting mail from a POP server delivers mail in the order
   that your server delivers mail. Fetchmail can't do anything about
   this; it's a limitation of the underlying POP protocol.
   
   In theory it might be possible for fetchmail in IMAP mode to sort
   messages by date, but this would be in violation of two basics of
   fetchmail's design philosophy: (a) to be as simple and transparent a
   pipe as possible, and (b) to hide, rather than emphasize, the
   differences between the remote-fetch protocols it uses.
   
   Re-ordering messages is a user-agent function, anyway.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O8. I'm using pppd. Why isn't my monitor option working?

   There is a combination of circumstances that can confuse fetchmail. If
   you have set up demand dialing with pppd, and pppd has an idle
   timeout, and you have lcp-echo-interval set, then the
   lcp-echo-interval time must be longer than the pppd idle timeout.
   Otherwise it is going keep increasing the packet counters that
   fetchmail relies upon, triggering fetchmail into polling after its own
   delay interval and thus preventing the pppd link from ever reaching
   its inactivity timeout.
     _________________________________________________________________
   
O9. Why does fetchmail keep retrieving the same messages over and over? First,
check to see that you haven't enabled the keep and fetchall option. If you
have, turn keep off.

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 many, especially most
POP3 servers, do exactly that). Your fetchmail is able to retrieve the
messages, but because the mailbox is write-locked by the other instance yours
can neither mark messages seen or delete them. The solution is to either (a)
wait for the other client to finish, or (b) terminate it.
  __________________________________________________________________________

   Back to Fetchmail Home Page To Site Map $Date: 2000/03/04 00:13:09 $
   
   
    Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
