Turn on the forcecr option; qmail's listener mode doesn't like header or message lines terminated with bare linefeeds. 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.

Multidrop-mode problems: M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop mail is going to root anyway.

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.

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: 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.

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.

Stock fetchmail will work with a comcast.net server...but they seem to have an 80K limit on the length of downloaded messages. Anything larger is silently truncated. Don't mistake this for a fetchmail bug.

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.

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.

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.

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 atttachments on the floor, though.

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. with M$ Exchange, the only real fix for these problems is to get a POP (or preferably IMAP) server that isn't brain-dead.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Lotus Notes SMTP gateway tries to deduce when it should convert \n to \r\n, but its rules are not the intuitive and correct-for-RFC822 ones. Use 'forcecr'. S1. How can I use fetchmail with qpopper? Qualcomm's qpopper is probably the best-of-breed among POP3 servers, and is very widely deployed. Nevertheless, it has some problems which fetchmail exposes. We recommend using IMAP instead if at all possible.

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.

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.

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: Multi-drop mode Demon Internet's SDPS service is an implementation of POP3.

The program "sendmail" that comes with qmail is fully compatible with argus. Make sure argus discovers the correct path during Configure (you can edit the Makefile if needed). (typically, it is installed in '/var/qmail/bin/'). It will just work. Monitoring from several different locations is a highly recommended part of a well balanced monitoring archetecture.

qmail was most likely chosen due to it's strong security record. There has been a bounty for a verifiable remote exploit since 1997, and thus far there have been no takers. In addition, qmail has many user friendly web based tools that make management and domain delegation a snap, thanks to a lot of work by Inter7.

Dan J. Bernstein distributes all software he has written with a restrictive license, consequently, it's in the non-free area. Since the license he uses does not allow modified binaries to be distributed, you have to compile it yourself from the source and the Debian patches to obtain a binary package you can install in your Debian GNU/Linux system. For qmail you need to install qmail-src first and then run build-qmail to build the Debian package.