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     _________________________________________________________________

                  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@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. I want to make fetchmail behave like Outlook Express.
   G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?
   G7. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?
   G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?
   G9. What is the best mail program to use with fetchmail?
   G10. How can I avoid sending my password en clair?
   G11. Is any special configuration needed to use a dynamic IP address?
   G12. Is any special configuration needed to use firewalls?
   G13. Is any special configuration needed to send mail?
   G14. Is fetchmail Y2K-compliant?
   G15. Is there a way in fetchmail to support disconnected IMAP mode?
   G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?

                             Build-time problems:

   B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.
   B2. Lex bombs out while building the fetchmail lexer.
   B3. I get link failures when I try to build fetchmail.
   B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.

                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?
   T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?
   T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?

               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 HP OpenMail?
   S4. How can I use fetchmail with Novell GroupWise?
   S5. How can I use fetchmail with InterChange?
   S6. How can I use fetchmail with MailMax?
   S7. How can I use fetchmail with FTGate?

                   How to fetchmail work with specific ISPs:

   I1. How can I use fetchmail with Compuserve RPA?
   I2. How can I use fetchmail with Demon Internet's SDPS?
   I3. How can I use fetchmail with usa.net's servers?
   I4. How can I use fetchmail with geocities POP3 servers?
   I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?
   I6. How can I use fetchmail with MSN?
   I7. How can I use fetchmail with SpryNet?
   I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?

         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 randomly dies with socket errors.
   R7. Fetchmail running as root stopped working after an OS upgrade
   R8. Fetchmail is timing out after fetching certain messages but before
   deleting them
   R9. Fetchmail is timing out during message fetches
   R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.
   R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.

                              Hangs and lockups:

   H1. Fetchmail hangs when used with pppd.
   H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM exchange.
   H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.

                              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!
   X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or mangled.
   X7. Some mail attachments are hanging fetchmail.
   X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my messages.

                                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?
   O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the same?
   O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll immediately" in my logs.
   O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.
   O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.

                                   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://fetchmail.berlios.de.  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-users. When reporting bugs, please
   include the following:
    1. Your operating system.
    2. Your  compiler  version,  if you built from source; otherwise, the
       name and origin of the RPM or other binary package you installed.
    3. A copy of your POP or IMAP server's greeting line.
    4. The  name  and  version  of  the  SMTP  listener  or  MDA  you are
       forwarding to.
    5. Any command-line options you used.
    6. 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.

   If  your  bug  is something that used to work but stopped working when
   you   upgraded,  then  you  can  help  pin  the  bug  down  by  trying
   intermediate  versions  of  fetchmail  until you identify the revision
   that  broke your feature. The smart way to do this is by binary search
   on  the  version sequence. First, try the version halfway between your
   last  good  one  and  the  current  one.  If it works, the failure was
   introduced  in  the  upper  half  of  the sequence; if it doesn't, the
   failure  was introduced in the lower half. Now bisect that half in the
   same  way.  In  a  very  few tries, you should be able to identify the
   exact  adjacent pair of versions between which your bug was introduced
   --  and  with  information like that, I can usually come up with a fix
   very quickly.

   Another  useful thing you can do, if you're using POP3, is to test for
   IMAP4  support  on  your  mailserver  using  the autoprobe function of
   fetchmailconf.  If  you have IMAP4, and fetchmailconf doesn't tell you
   it's  broken,  switch  immediately.  POP3  is  a weak, poorly-designed
   protocol  with  chronic problems, and the later versions after RFC1725
   actually get worse rather than better. Changing over to IMAP4 may well
   make  your  problem  go  away  --  and  if your ISP doesn't have IMAP4
   support, bug them to supply it.

   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 transcripts can be passed around.

   If you upgraded your fetchmail and something broke, you should include
   session  transcripts  with  -v  -v  of  both  the  working and failing
   versions.  Very  often,  the  source  of  the  problem  can  instantly
   identified by looking at the differences in protocol transactions.

   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

   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.  If  you  really  want  fetchmail to do it from the client
   side, yse a preconnect command to call mailfilter.

   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. I want to make fetchmail behave like Outlook Express.

   The  second-most-requested  feature for fetchmail, after content-based
   filtering,  is  the ability to have it remove messages from a maildrop
   after  N  days, typically to be used with the keep option as a sort of
   poor  man's  newsgroup  facility. Microsoft's Outlook Express supports
   this.

   This  feature  won't be added either. Repeat after me: fetchmail's job
   is  transport,  not  policy.  If you want this, write a Perl or Python
   script,  to be run from a cron job, that deletes old messages off your
   maildrop. Send it to me and I'll put it in the contrib directory.
     _________________________________________________________________

G6. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?

   There  is  a fetchmail-users list (fetchmail-users@lists.berlios.de)
   for people who want to discuss fixes and improvements in fetchmail and
   help  co-develop it. It's a MailMan list, which you can sign up for at
   http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-users.   There   is
   also  an  announcements-only  list, fetchmail-announce@lists.berlios.de,
   which you can sign up for at
   http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/fetchmail-announce.
     _________________________________________________________________

G7. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

G8. What is the best server to use with fetchmail?

   The short answer: IMAP 2000 running over Unix.

   Here's a longer answer:

   Fetchmail  will  work  with  any  POP, IMAP, ETRN, or ODMR 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. The new
   IMAP  2000  is particularly nice, as it supports CRAM-MD5 so you don't
   have  to  ship  your  mail  password  over the net en clair (fetchmail
   autodetects  this  capability).  Older versions had support for GSSAPI
   giving a similar effect.

   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.

   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.
     _________________________________________________________________

G9. 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 :-).
     _________________________________________________________________

G10. 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 (whether plain old copper
   or  DSL),  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 phone-company
   wire  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 or DSL POP 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).

   If  your  mailserver  is using IMAP 2000, you'll have CRAM-MD5 support
   built  in.  Fetchmail  autodetects this; you can skip the rest of this
   section.

   The  POP3 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 and POP3 facility described by
   RFC1731  and  RFC1734.  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 I1 for
   details.  If you are fetching mail from Microsoft Exchange using IMAP,
   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.

   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 ;-)

   Finally,  you  can  use  SSL for complete end-to-end encryption if you
   have an SSL-enabled mailserver.
     _________________________________________________________________

G11. 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.

   You  can't use ETRN if you have a dynamic IP address (your ISP changes
   your  IP  address occasionally, possibly with every connect). You need
   to  have  your  own  registered  domain  and  a  definite  IP  address
   registered  for  that  domain.  The  server  needs to be configured to
   accept  mail  for  your  domain  but  then queue it to forward to your
   machine. ETRN just tells to server to flush its queue for your domain.
   Fetchmail doesn't actually get the mail in that case.

   You  can  use  On-Demand  Mail Relay (ODMR) with a dynamic IP address;
   that's  what  it  was  designed for, and it provides capabilities very
   similar  to  ETRN.  Unfortunately  ODMR  servers  are  not  yet widely
   deployed, as of early 2001.

   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.
     _________________________________________________________________

G12. 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
     _________________________________________________________________

G13. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

G14. 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'll deserve to lose.
     _________________________________________________________________

G15. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

G16. How will fetchmail perform under heavy loads?

   Fetchmail  streams  message bodies line-by-line; the most core it ever
   requires  per  message is enough memory to hold the RFC822 header, and
   that storage is freed when body processing begins. It is, accordingly,
   quite economical in its use of memory.

   After  startup  time,  a  fetchmail  running  in daemon mode stats its
   configuration  file  once per poll cycle to see whether it has changed
   and  should  be  rescanned.  Other  than  that,  a fetchmail in normal
   operation  doesn't  touch  the disk at all; that job is left up to the
   MTA or MDA the fetchmail talks to.

   Fetchmail's  performance is usually bottlenecked by latency on the POP
   server or (less often) on the TCP/IP link to the server. This is not a
   problem  readily  solved  by  tuning fetchmail, or even by buying more
   TCP/IP  capacity (which tends to improve bandwidth but not necessarily
   latency).
     _________________________________________________________________

B1. Make coughs and dies when building on FreeBSD.

   The  vendor-supplied  make  on FreeBSD systems can only be used within
   FreeBSD's  "scope", e.g. the ports collection. Type "gmake" to run GNU
   make and better things will happen.
     _________________________________________________________________

B2. 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.

   (The same problem has been reported under HP-UX v10.20 and IRIX)
     _________________________________________________________________

B3. 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.

   If you get link errors involving dcgettext, like this:
rcfile_y.o: In function `yyparse':
rcfile_y.o(.text+0x3aa): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
rcfile_y.o(.text+0x4f2): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
rcfile_y.o(.text+0x5ee): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
rcfile_y.o: In function `yyerror':
rcfile_y.o(.text+0xc7c): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
rcfile_y.o(.text+0xcc8): undefined reference to `dcgettext__'
rcfile_y.o(.text+0xdf9): more undefined references to `dcgettext__' follow

   reconfigure  with  configure  --with-included-gettext.  This is due to
   some brain-damage in the GNU internationalization libraries.
     _________________________________________________________________

B4. I get build failures in the intl directory.

   Reconfigure with --disable-nls and recompile.

   GNU  gettext  is  an  overengineered,  fragile  pile  of  crap. I have
   teetered  on  the  brink  of  removing support for it entirely several
   times.
     _________________________________________________________________

F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no longer work?

  If your file predates 5.8.9

   If  you  were  using  ETRN  mode,  change  your  smtphost  option to a
   fetchdomains option.

  If your file predates 5.8.3

   The  `via localhost' special case for use with ssh tunnelling is gone.
   Use the %h feature of plugin instead.

  If your file predates 5.6.8

   In  5.6.8,  the  preauth keyword and option were changed back to auth.
   The  preauth  synonym will still be supported through a few more point
   releases.

  If your file predates 5.6.5

   The imap-gss, imap-k4, and imap-login protocol types are gone. This is
   a  result  of  a  major  re-factoring of the authentication machinery;
   fetchmail  can  now  use Kerberos V4 and GSSAPI not just with IMAP but
   with POP3 servers that have RFC1734 support for the AUTH command.

   When  trying  to  identify you to an IMAP or POP mailserver, fetchmail
   now  first  tries  methods  that  don't  require  a  password (GSSAPI,
   KERBEROS_IV);  then  it  looks  for  methods  that  mask your password
   (CRAM-MD5,  X-OTP);  and  only if it the server doesn't support any of
   those will it ship your password en clair.

   Setting  the  preauth  option  to any value other than `password' will
   prevent  from  looking  for a password in your .netrc file or querying
   for it at startup time.

  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 8.9.3-20 (the version
   installed  in  Red  Hat  6.2)  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/access. The database itself is at /etc/mail/access.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  or  smtpname  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: $h

   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).   However  it  will  still  not
   distinguish the recipients, your only advantage is that no bounce will
   be  sent if a message is BCC addressed to multiple users at your site.
   To  fix  even  that problem, you might want to try the following hack,
   which is however untested and quite experimental:
H?J?Delivered-To: $u

Mmdrop, P=/usr/bin/procmail, F=lsDFMqSPfhnu9J,
    S=EnvFromSMTP/HdrFromSMTP, R=EnvToSMTP/HdrToSMTP,
    T=DNS/RFC822/X-Unix,
    A=procmail -Y -a $u -d $h

   For  both hacks, you have to declare `envelope "Delivered-To:"' on the
   fetchmail  side,  to  put  the virtual domain (e.g. `domain.com') with
   RELAY  permission  into  your  access  file  and to add a line reading
   `domain.com   local:local-pop-user'  for  the  first  and  `domain.com
   mdrop:local-pop-user' for the second hack to your mailertable.

   You  will  notice  that if the mail already has a Delivered-To header,
   sendmail  will not add another.  Further, editing sendmail.cf directly
   is  not very comfortable.  Solutions for both problems can be found in
   Peter  `Rattacresh'  Backes'  `hybrid' patch against sendmail.  Have a
   look at it, you can find it in the contrib subdirectory.

   Feel  free  to  try  Martijn Lievaart's detailed recipe in the contrib
   subdirectory  of  the  fetchmail  source  distribution, it attempts to
   realize multidrop mailboxes with an external script.

   If  for  some  reason  you  are  invoking  sendmail via the mda option
   (rather  than delivering to port 25 via smtp), don't forget to include
   the -i switch. Otherwise you will occasionally get mysterious delivery
   failures  with a SIGPIPE as the sendmail instance dies. The problem is
   messages with a single dot at start of a text line.
     _________________________________________________________________

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.

   You  may  also need to say -smtp_hello_broken_allow=127.0.0.1 in order
   for smail to accept the "localhost" that fetchmail normally appends to
   recipient addresses.
     _________________________________________________________________

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'.
     _________________________________________________________________

T7. How can I use fetchmail with Courier IMAP?

   The   courier   mta   doesn't  like  RCPT  addresses  that  look  like
   someone@localhost. Work around this with an smtphost or smtpaddress.
     _________________________________________________________________

T8. How can I use fetchmail with vbmailshield?

   vbmailshield's SMTP interpreter is broken. It doesn't understand RSET.

   As a workaround, you can set batchlimit to 1 so RSET is never used.
     _________________________________________________________________

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?

   It's  been  reliably  reported that Exchange 2000's POP3 support is so
   broken  that  it's  unusable.  One  symptom is that messages without a
   terminating  newline  get  the POP3 message termination dot emitted --
   you  guessed it -- right after the last character of the message, with
   no  terminating  newline  added. This will hang fetchmail or any other
   RFC-compliant server. IMAP is alleged to work OK, though.

   Older  versions  of  Exchange  are  semi-usable.  They  randomly  drop
   attachments  on  the  floor,  though. Microsoft acknowledges this as a
   known bug and apparently has no plans to fix it.

   Fetchmail  using  IMAP supports the proprietary NTLM mode used with M$
   Exchange  servers.  To  enable  this,  configure  fetchmail  with  the
   --enable-NTLM  option  and  recompile  it. Specify a user option value
   that  looks  like `user@domain': the part to the left of the @ will be
   passed as the username and the part to the right as the NTLM domain.

   M$ Exchange violates the POP3 and IMAP RFCs. Its LIST command does not
   reveal the real sizes of mail in the pop mailbox, but the sizes of the
   compressed  versions in the exchange mail database (thanks to Arjan De
   Vet and Guido Van Rooij for alerting us to this problem).

   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:
     * 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-ROM.
     _________________________________________________________________

S3. 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.

   We've  had  a  more recent report (December 2001) that the TOP command
   fails,  returning  only  one  line  regrardless  of  its  argument, on
   something identifying itself as "OpenMail POP3 interface".
     _________________________________________________________________

S4. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

S5. 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.

   On  Jan  9  2001, the people at InfiniteMail sent me mail informing me
   that  their  new  3.61.08 release of InterChange fixes this problem. I
   don't have any reports one way or the other yet.
     _________________________________________________________________

S6. 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.

   Also,  we're  told  that  TOP  sometimes  fails to retrieve the entire
   message  even  when  enough  lines  have  been  specified. The MailMax
   developers  have  acknowledged this bug as of 4 May 2000, but there is
   no  fix yet. If you must use this server, force RETR with the fetchall
   option.
     _________________________________________________________________

S7. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

I1. 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
     _________________________________________________________________

I2. 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 *

   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.
     _________________________________________________________________

I3. 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.

   Also,  we're told USA.NET adds a ton of hops to your messages. You may
   need  to  raise the MaxHopCount parameter in your sendmail.cf to avoid
   having fetched mail rejected.

   (Note:  Other  failure  modes have been reported on usa.net's servers.
   They  seem  to  be  chronically  flaky.  We  recommend finding another
   provider.)
     _________________________________________________________________

I4. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

I5. How can I use fetchmail with Hotmail?

   You can't, yet. But gotmail or HotWayDaemon might be what you need.
     _________________________________________________________________

I6. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

I7. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

I8. How can I use fetchmail with comcast.net?

   Stock   fetchmail  will  work  with  a  comcast.net  server...but  the
   Maillennium  POP3 server comcat uses seems to have an 80K limit on the
   length  of  downloaded  messages  if  you  use  POP3  TOP to retrieve.
   Anything  larger  is  silently  truncated.  Don't  mistake  this for a
   fetchmail bug. (Reported July 2003.)

   Workaround: use the fetchall option.
     _________________________________________________________________

K1. How can I use fetchmail with SOCKS?

   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.

   Alan  Schmitt  has  added a similar --with-socks5 option that may work
   better if you have a recent version of the SOCKS library.
     _________________________________________________________________

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 a 2.2
   or  later  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
   http://ftp.ps.pl/pub/linux/IPv6/inet6-apps/.

   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?

   Use the plugin option. This is dead simple with IMAP:
    plugin "ssh %h /usr/sbin/imapd"

   You  may  have  to  use  a  different  absolute pathname, whatever the
   location  of  imapd on your mailserver is. This option tells fetchmail
   that  instead  of  opening  a  connection on the server's port 143 and
   doing standard IMAP authentication, fetchmail should ssh to the server
   and  run  imapd,  using the more secure ssh authentication (as well as
   getting  ssh's  end-to-end  encryption). Most IMAP daemons will detect
   that  they've  been  called  from  the  command  line  and  assume the
   connection is preauthenticated.

   POP3  daemons  aren't  quite  as  smart.  They  won't  know  they  are
   preauthenticated  in  this  mode, so you'll actually have to ship your
   password.  It  will be under ssh encryption, though, so that shouldn't
   be a problem.
     _________________________________________________________________

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).  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) ths 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.

   Note that there is a known bug in the implementation of SSL_peek under
   OpenSSL  versions  0.9.5 and older that fetchmail occasionally tripped
   over,  causing  hangs.  It  is  recommended  that you install 0.9.6 or
   later.

   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
   details and some words of care on the limited security provided.

   If  your open OpenSSL session dies with a message that complains "PRNG
   not  seeded", update or improve your operating system. This means that
   the OpenSSL library on your machine has been unable to locate a source
   of  random  bits  from  which  to  seed  its  random-number generator;
   normally  these  come from the /dev/urandom, and this message probably
   means your OS doesn't have that device.

   An  interactive  program  could  seed the random number generator from
   keystroke  timings or some other form of user input. Because fetchmail
   is  primarily  designed  to  run  forever as a background daemon, that
   option is not available in this case.

   If  you  don't  have  the libraries installed, but do have the OpenSSL
   utility toolkit, something like this may work:
poll MYSERVER port 993 plugin "openssl s_client -connect %h:%p"
        protocol imap username MYUSERNAME password MYPASSWORD
     _________________________________________________________________

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.

   In  Red  Hat  Linux 6.x, SMTP is disabled by default. To fix this, set
   "DAEMON=yes"   in  your  /etc/sysconfig/sendmail  file,  then  restart
   sendmail by running "/sbin/service sendmail restart".

   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. We have another report of
   similar  behavior  from  one  Linux  user,  but many other Linux users
   reportt no problem.

   If this happens, you have a specific portability problem with the code
   in  daemon.c  that  detaches and backgrounds the daemon fetchmail. The
   isolated  Linux  case has been chased down to a failure in dup(2) that
   may reflect a glibc bug.

   As  a  workaround, you can start fetchmail with -N and an ampersand to
   background it. A Sun user recommends this:
(fetchmail --nodetach <other params> &)

   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!
     _________________________________________________________________

R6. 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

   Another  circumstance  that  can  trigger this is if you are polling a
   virtual-mail-server  name  that  is round-robin connected to different
   actual  servers,  so  you get different IP addresses on different poll
   cycles.  To  work around this, change the poll name either to the real
   name  of  one  of  the  servers  in  the ring or to a corresponding IP
   address.
     _________________________________________________________________

R7. 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.)
     _________________________________________________________________

R8. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

R9. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

R10. Fetchmail is dying with SIGPIPE.

   This probably means you have an mda option. Your MDA is croaking while
   being  passed a message. Best fix is to remove the mda option and pass
   mail to your port 25 SMTP listener.

   If  for  some  reason  you  are  invoking  sendmail via the mda option
   (rather  than delivering to port 25 via smtp), don't forget to include
   the -i switch. Otherwise you will occasionally get mysterious delivery
   failures  with a SIGPIPE as the sendmail instance dies. The problem is
   messages with a single dot at start of a text line.
     _________________________________________________________________

R11. My server is hanging or emitting errors on CAPA.

   Your  POP3  server  is  broken.  You  can  work  around  this with the
   declaration auth password in your .fetchmailrc.
     _________________________________________________________________

H1. 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.
     _________________________________________________________________

H2. Fetchmail hangs during the MAIL FROM exchange.

   The  symptom:  'fetchmail -v' retrieves mail fine, but appears to hang
   after sending the MAIL FROM command
SMTP> MAIL FROM: <someone@somewhere>

   The  hang  is  actually  occuring  when  sendmail  looks up a sender's
   address   in   DNS.   The  problem  isn't  in  fetchmail  but  in  the
   configuration   of   sendmail.   You   must  enable  the  'nodns'  and
   'nocanonify' features of sendmail.

   Here was my fix for RedHat 7.2:
    1. # cd /etc/mail
    2. # cp sendmail.mc sendmail-mine.mc
    3. Edit sendmail-mine.mc and add lines:
   FEATURE(nodns)
   FEATURE(nocanonify)
    4. Build a new sendmail.cf
   # m4 sendmail-mine.cf > /etc/sendmail.cf
    5. Restart sendmail.

   For more details consult the file /usr/share/sendmail-cf/README.
     _________________________________________________________________

H3. Fetchmail hangs while fetching mail.

   The  symption:  'fetchmail  -v'  retrieves the first few messages, but
   hangs returning:
 fetchmail: SMTP< 550 5.0.0 Access denied
 fetchmail: SMTP> RSET
 fetchmail: SMTP< 250 2.0.0 Reset state
 .......fetchmail:  flushed
 fetchmail: POP3> DELE 1
 fetchmail: POP3< +OK marked deleted

   Check  and  see  if  you're  allowing sendmail connections through TCP
   wrappers.

   Adding  'sendmail  :  127.0.0.1'  to /etc/hosts.allow could solve this
   problem.
     _________________________________________________________________

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.

   Or you may have your local user set incorrectly. In the following line
        user 'remoteuser' there with password '*' is 'localuser' here

   make sure that 'localuser' does exist and can receive mail.
     _________________________________________________________________

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 one of the spam-filter errors (see the description of
   the  antispam> option) 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 or ODMR modes 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 trouble is that this is an O(N**2) operation that
   might significantly slow down the retrieval 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 this has the side
   effect of forcing RETR use.
     _________________________________________________________________

X6. My mail attachments are being dropped or mangled.

   Fetchmail doesn't discard attachments; fetchmail doesn't have any idea
   that  attachments are there. Fetchmail treats the body of each message
   as  an  uninterpreted  byte  stream  and  passes  it  through  without
   alteration. If you are not receiving attachments through fetchmail, it
   is because your mailserver is not sending them to you.

   The fix for this is to replace your mailserver with one that works. If
   its  operating  system  makes  this  difficult, you should replace its
   operating  system  with  one  that  works.  Windows-  and NT-based POP
   servers  seem  especially  prone  to  mangle  attachments.  If you are
   running  one  of  these,  replacing your server with a Unix machine is
   probably the only effective solution.

   We've  had  sporadic  reports  of problems with Microsoft Exchange and
   Outlook  servers. These sometimes randomly fail to ship attachments to
   your client. This is a known bug, acknowledged by Microsft.

   They  may also mangle the attachments they do pass through. If you see
   unreadable  attachments  with  a  ContentType of "application/x-tnef",
   you're having this problem. The TNEF utility may help.

   The  Mail  Max  POP3 server and the InterChange and Imail IMAP servers
   are known to simply drop MIME attachments when uploading messages.

   We've  also  had  a report that Lotus Notes sometimes trashes the MIME
   type  of  messages.  In particular, it seems to modify MIME headers of
   type  application/pdf,  mangling the type to application/octet-stream.
   It may corrupt other MIME types as well.

   The  IMAP  service  of  Lotus  Domino  has  a  known bug in the way it
   generates MIME Content-type headers (observed on Lotus Domino 5.0.2b).
   It's  a  subtle  one  that doesn't show up when Netscape Messenger and
   other  clients  use  a  FETCH  BODY[]  to grab the whole message. When
   fetchmail  uses FETCH RFC822.HEADER and FETCH RFC822.TEXT to get first
   the header and then the body, Domino generates different Boundary tags
   for  each  part,  .e.g. one tag is declared in the Content-type header
   and  another  is  used  to  separate  the MIME parts in the body. This
   doesn't  work.  (I have heard a rumor that this bug is scheduled to be
   fixed   in   Domino   release   6;   you  can  find  a  workaround  at
   contrib/domino.)

   Rob  Funk  explains:  Unfortunately  there  also remain many mail user
   agents that don't write correct MIME messages. One big offender is Sun
   MailTool  attachments,  which are formatted enough like MIME that some
   programs  could  get confused; these are generated by the mailtool and
   dtmail  programs  (the  mail  programs  in  Sun's  OpenWindows and CDE
   environments).

   One  solution  to problems related to misformatted MIME attachments is
   the  emil  program;  see its tutorial file at that site for details on
   emil.   It   is  useful  for  converting  character  sets,  attachment
   encodings,  and  attachment  formats.  At  this writing, emil does not
   appear  to have been maintained since a patch to version 2.1.0beta9 in
   late 1997, but it is still useful.

   One  good  way  of  using  emil  is from within procmail. You can have
   procmail  look  for  signs of problematic message formatting, and pipe
   those  messages through emil to be fixed. emil will not always be able
   to fix the problem, in which case the message is unchanged.

   A  possible rule to be inserted into a .procmailrc file for using emil
   would be:
:0HB
* 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/X-sun[^;]*
* 1^1 ^Content-Type: \/application/mac-binhex[^;]*
* 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-binhex[^;]*
* 1^1 ^Content-Transfer-Encoding: \/x-uuencode[^;]*
{
  LOG="Converting $MATCH
"
  :0fw
  | emil -A B -T Q -B BA -C iso-8859-1 -H Q -F MIME \
  | gawk '{gsub(/\r\n?/,"\n");print $0}'
}

   The "1^1" in the conditions is a way of specifying to procmail that if
   any  one  of  the four listed expressions is found in the message, the
   total  condition  is considered true, and the message gets passed into
   emil.  These  four  subconditions  check whether the message has a Sun
   attachment,  a binhex attachment, or a uuencoded attachment; there are
   others  that  could be added to check these things better and to check
   other  relevant  conditions.  The  "LOG="  line writes a line into the
   procmail log; the lone double-quote beginning the following line makes
   sure  the  log  entry  gets an end-of-line character. The call to gawk
   (GNU  awk) is for fixing end-of-line conventions, since emil sometimes
   leaves  those  in  the  format  of  the  originating machine; it could
   probably be replaced with a sed subsitution.

   The emil call itself tries to ensure that the message uses:
     * BinHex encoding for any Apple Macintosh-only attachments
     * Quoted-Printable encoding for text (when necessary)
     * Base64 Encoding for binary attachments
     * iso-8859-1  character  set  for text (unfortunately emil can't yet
       convert from windows-1252 to iso-8859-1)
     * Quoted-Printable encoding for headers
     * MIME attachment format

   Most  of these (the primary exceptions being the character set and the
   Apple  binary  format)  are  as  they  should  be  for  good  internet
   interoperability.

   Some   mail   servers   (Lotus   Domino  is  a  suspect  here)  mangle
   Sun-formatted  messages,  so  the  conversion  to MIME needs to happen
   before such programs see the message. The ideal is to rid the world of
   Sun-formatted messages: don't use mailtool for sending attachments (it
   doesn't  understand  MIME  anyway,  and  most  of  the  world  doesn't
   understand  its  attachments,  so it really shouldn't be used at all),
   and make sure dtmail is set to use MIME rather than mailtool's format.
     _________________________________________________________________

X7. Some mail attachments are hanging fetchmail.

   This isn't fetchmail's problem either; fetchmail doesn't know anything
   about  mail  attachments  and  doesn't treat them any differently from
   plain message data.

   The  most usual cause of this problem seems to be bugs in your network
   transport  layer's  capability to handle the very large TCP/IP packets
   that attachments tend to turn into. You can test this theory by trying
   to  download  the  offending  message through a webmail account; using
   HTTP  for  the  message  tends  to simulate large-packet stress rather
   well,  and  you  will  probably find that the messages that seem to be
   choking fetchmail will make your HTTP download speed drop to zero.

   This  problem  can  be  caused by subtle bugs in the packet-reassembly
   layer  of  your  TCP/IP  stack;  these  often don't manifest at normal
   packet  sizes.  It  may  also  be  caused  by  malfunctioning path-MTU
   discovery  on  the  mailserver. Or, if there's a modem in the link, it
   may be because the attachment contains the Hayes mode escape "+++".
     _________________________________________________________________

X8. A spurious ) is being appended to my messages.

   Blame  it  on  that  rancid  pile  of  dung and offal called Microsoft
   Exchange.  Due  to  the  problem  described in S2, the IMAP support in
   fetchmail  cannot  follow  the IMAP protocol 100%. Most of the time it
   doesn't matter, but if you combine it with an SMTP server that behaves
   unusually, you'll get a spurious ) at message end.

   One  piece  of  software that can trigger this is the Interchange mail
   server, as used by, e.g., mailandnews.com. Here's what happens:

   1.  Someone  sends  mail to your account. The last line of the message
   contains  text.  So  at  the  SMTP  level, the message ends with, e.g.
   "blahblah\r\n.\r\n"

   2.  The SMTP handler sees the final "\r\n.\r\n" and recognizes the end
   of  the  message. However, instead of doing the normal thing, which is
   tossing  out  the  ".\r\n" and leaving the first '\r\n' as part of the
   email  body,  Interchange throws out the whole "\r\n.\r\n", and leaves
   the  email  body  without any line terminator at the end of it. RFC821
   does not forbid this, though it probably should.

   3.  Fetchmail,  or  some other IMAP client, asks for the message. IMAP
   returns  it,  but  it's  enclosed inside parentheses, according to the
   protocol.  The  message  size  in  bytes  is also present. Because the
   message doesn't end with a line terminator, the IMAP client sees:

 ....blahblah)...

   where the ')' is from IMAP.

   4.  Fetchmail  only  deals  with  complete  lines, and can't trust the
   stated message size because Microsoft Exchange fscks it up.

   5.  As  a result, fetchmail takes the final 'blahblah)' and puts it at
   the  end  of  the  message  it  forwards on. If you have verbosity on,
   you'll get a message about actual != expected.

   There is no fix for this. The nuke mentioned in S2 looks more tempting
   all the time.
     _________________________________________________________________

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.

   There  are  various  forms  of lossage involving the POP3 UIDL feature
   that  can  lead to all your old messages being seen again after a line
   drop.  I  have  given  up trying to fix these, as the UIDL code breaks
   worse  every  time I touch it. The problem is fundamental; maintaining
   and  garbage-collecting  the  right  kind of client-side state is just
   hard.  Whoever put UIDLs in RFC1725 and removed LAST should be hung up
   by his thumbs and whipped with scorpions. The right answers are either
   (a) live with the occasional breakage, (b) switch to IMAP4, or (c) fix
   the  code yourself and send me a patch. Unless you choose (c), I don't
   want to hear about it.

   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.

   James Stevens <James.Stevens at kyzo.com> writes:

   We had a Linux box dialing the Net and collecting mail from an NT POP3
   server.  Fetchmail  was  correctly collecting and deleting each e-mail
   one  by  one.  However,the  dial-up connection was very unreliable and
   would often just drop out in the middle of a session.

   Interestingly,  unless the TCP POP3 connection was terminated normally
   (I  guess  with a POP3 "QUIT" command) NT would then roll back all the
   deletes !!!

   This  meant  if  the  first e-mail was very large it might just end up
   continuously  collecting  it,  basically jamming the queue. Or, if the
   queue  became  very  full  itmight  never  get  a  long  enough  phone
   connection  to retrieve the entire mailbox, and NT would roll back any
   deletes,  so it would end up collecting (and delivering) the first few
   e-mails  again and again. As the POP3 mailbox became fuller and fuller
   the  chances  of getting a connection long enough to collect theentire
   mailbox became smaller and smaller.

   Our  solution  was  to make fetchmail only collect a few (say 5 or 10)
   e-mails  at  atime,  thus trying to ensure that the POP3 connection is
   terminated correctly.

   Unfortunately,  this  is  exactly the way POP3 servers are supposed to
   behave on a line drop, according to the RFCs. I recommend switching to
   IMAP and using a short expunge interval.
     _________________________________________________________________

O10. Why is the received date on all my messages the same?

   This  is  a  design choice in your MTA, not fetchmail. It's taking the
   received date from the last Received header.
     _________________________________________________________________

O11. I keep getting messages that say "Repoll immediately" in my logs.

   This is your server barfing on the CAPA probe that fetchmail sends.
   If  you  run fetchmail in daemon mode (say "set daemon 600"), you will
   get the message only once per run.

   If  you  set  an  authentication  method  explicitly  (say,  with auth
   password), you will never get the message.
     _________________________________________________________________

O12. Fetchmail no longer expunges mail on a 451 SMTP response.

   This is a feature, not a bug.

   Any  4xx  response (like 451) indicates a transient (temporary) error.
   This  means  that  the mail could be accepted if retried later. Lookup
   failures  are  normally  transient  errors  as  a  mail should not get
   rejected if a dns server is unreachable or down.

   A permanent reject response is of the form 5xx (like 550).

   You could tell your SMTP server to not lookup any addresses if you are
   not  keen  on  checking  the  sender addresses. This problem typically
   occurs  if  your mail server is not checking the sender addresses, but
   your local server is.

   Or you could declare antispam 451

   Or,  you  could check your nameserver configuration and query logs for
   dns errors.

   All these issues are not related to fetchmail directly.
     _________________________________________________________________

O13. I want timestamp information in my fetchmail logs.

   Write  a  preconnect  command  in  your  configuration  file that does
   something like "date >> $HOME/Procmail/fetchmail.log".
     _________________________________________________________________

   Back to Fetchmail Home Page To Site Map $Date: 2003/10/10 19:10:29 $


    Eric S. Raymond <esr@thyrsus.com>
