getmail is a simple

mail retrieval agent A mail retrieval agent (MRA) is a computer application that retrieves or fetches e-mail from a remote mail server and works with a mail delivery agent to deliver mail to a local or remote email mailbox. MRAs may be external applications by themse ...

intended as a replacement for fetchmail, implemented in Python. It can retrieve mail from

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 comm ...

IMAP4 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 ...

, and ''Standard Dial-up POP3 Service'' servers, with or without

SSL SSL may refer to: Entertainment * RoboCup Small Size League, robotics football competition * ''Sesame Street Live'', a touring version of the children's television show * StarCraft II StarLeague, a Korean league in the video game Natural language ...

. It supports simple and domain (multidrop) mailboxes,

mail filter Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. The term can apply to the intervention of human intelligence, but most often refers to the automatic processing of messages at an SMTP server, possibly appl ...

ing via any arbitrary program, and supports a wide variety of mail destination types, including

mboxrd Mbox is a generic term for a family of related file formats used for holding collections of email messages. It was first implemented in Fifth Edition Unix. All messages in an mbox mailbox are concatenated and stored as plain text in a single fi ...

, maildir, and external arbitrary

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 calle ...

s. Unlike fetchmail, getmail's Python foundation makes it nearly immune to

buffer overflow In information security and programming, a buffer overflow, or buffer overrun, is an anomaly whereby a program, while writing data to a buffer, overruns the buffer's boundary and overwrites adjacent memory locations. Buffers are areas of memor ...

security holes. It also has a simpler configuration syntax than fetchmail, but supports fewer authentication protocols. The software can also function as a basic

. Getmail is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, ...

and is licensed under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end user In product development, an end user (sometimes end-user) is a person who ultimately uses or is intended to ulti ...

version 2. It is written and maintained by Charles Cazabon. The original getmail software requires Python 2, which is no longer supported. A fork named getmail6, which is not from getmail's original author, provides Python 3 support.

References

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External links

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getmail6 fork
Free email software Free software programmed in Python Email clients {{network-software-stub

See also

References

Bibliography

External links