Fetchmail is an

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Op ...

utility for

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

-compliant operating systems which is used to retrieve

e-mail Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic ( digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...

from a remote

POP3 In computing, the Post Office Protocol (POP) is an application-layer Internet standard protocol used by e-mail clients to retrieve e-mail from a mail server. POP version 3 (POP3) is the version in common use, and along with IMAP the most common p ...

IMAP In computing, the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) is an Internet standard protocol used by email clients to retrieve email messages from a mail server over a TCP/IP connection. IMAP is defined by . IMAP was designed with the goal of per ...

, or ODMR mail server to the user's local system. It was developed from th
popclient
program, written by Carl Harris. Its chief significance is perhaps that its author,

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...

, used it as a model to discuss his theories of

development in a widely read and influential essay on software development methodologies ''

The Cathedral and the Bazaar ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary'' (abbreviated ''CatB'') is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux k ...

''.

Design

By design, Fetchmail's only means of delivering messages is by submitting them to the local MTA/

Message transfer agent Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent (MTA), or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host ...

or invoking a

mail delivery agent A message delivery agent (MDA), or mail delivery agent, is a computer software component that is responsible for the delivery of e-mail messages to a local recipient's mailbox., ''Internet Mail Architecture'', D. Crocker (July 2009) It is also call ...

procmail procmail is an email server software component — specifically, a message delivery agent (MDA). It was one of the earliest mail filter programs. It is typically used in Unix-like mail systems, using the mbox and Maildir storage formats. procm ...

maildrop Maildrop is a Mail delivery agent used by the Courier Mail Server. The maildrop Mail Delivery Agent (MDA) also includes filtering functionality. Maildrop receives mail via stdin and delivers in both Maildir and mbox formats. Features Mai ...

, or

sendmail Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) used for email transport over the Internet. A descendant of the ...

; delivering directly to mail folders such as

maildir The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages in which each message is stored in a separate file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory. The local file system handles file locking as messages are ...

is not supported.

Dan Bernstein Daniel Julius Bernstein (sometimes known as djb; born October 29, 1971) is an American German mathematician, cryptologist, and computer scientist. He is a visiting professor at CASA at Ruhr University Bochum, as well as a research professor ...

getmail getmail is a simple mail retrieval agent intended as a replacement for fetchmail, implemented in Python. It can retrieve mail from POP3, IMAP4, and ''Standard Dial-up POP3 Service'' servers, with or without SSL. It supports simple and domain ...

creator Charles Cazabon and FreeBSD developer Terry Lambert, have criticized Fetchmail's design, its number of security holes, and that it was prematurely put into "maintenance mode". In 2004, a new team of maintainers took over Fetchmail development, and laid out development plans that broke with design decisions that Eric Raymond had made in earlier versions.

References

External links

*
Fetchmail at SourceForge
https://sourceforge.net/directory/os:windows/?q=fetchmail Free email software Mail delivery agents {{network-software-stub

Design

See also

References

External links