fetchmail README
================

Introduction
------------

Fetchmail is a free, full-featured, robust, well-documented remote mail 
retrieval and forwarding utility intended to be used over on-demand TCP/IP 
links (such as SLIP or PPP connections).  It retrieves mail from remote mail 
servers and forwards it to your local (client) machine's delivery system, so it 
can then be be read by normal mail user agents such as mutt(1), elm(1) or 
Mail(1).

Fetchmail supports all standard mail-retrieval protocols in use on the 
Internet: POP3 (including some variants such as RPOP, APOP, KPOP), IMAP4rev1 
(also IMAP4, IMAP2bis), POP2, IMAP4, ETRN, and ODMR. On the output side, 
fetchmail supports ESMTP/SMTP, LMTP, and invocation of a local delivery agent.

Fetchmail also fully supports authentication via GSSAPI, Kerberos 4 and 5, 
RFC1938 one-time passwords, Compuserve's POP3 with RPA, Microsoft's NTLM, Demon 
Internet's SDPS, or CRAM-MD5 authentication a la RFC2195.

Fetchmail supports end-to-end encryption with OpenSSL, do read README.SSL for 
details on fetchmail's configuration and README.SSL-SERVER for server-side 
requirements.  NOTE! To be compatible with earlier releases, fetchmail 6.3's 
default behaviour is more relaxed than dictated by the standard - add options 
such as --sslcertck to tighten certificate checking.

Portability
-----------

The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been extensively 
tested under the BSD variants, AIX, HP-UX versions 9 and 10, SunOS, Solaris, 
NEXTSTEP, OSF 3.2, IRIX, and Rhapsody.

It should be readily portable to other Unix variants and Unix-like operating 
systems (it uses GNU autoconf).  It has been ported to Cygwin, LynxOS and BeOS 
and will build there without special action.  It has also been ported to QNX; 
to build under QNX, see the header comments in the Makefile.  It is reported to 
build and run under AmigaOS.

Further reading
---------------

The INSTALL file describes how to configure and install fetchmail.

See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS for 
detailed information on recent changes, NOTES for design notes, and TODO for 
a list of things that still need doing.  If you want to hack on this code, 
a list of known bugs and to-do items can be found in the file todo.html.

Status, source code
-------------------

The fetchmail code appears to be stable and free of bugs affecting normal 
operation (that is, retrieving from POP3 or IMAP in single-drop mode and 
forwarding via SMTP to sendmail).

You can get the code from the fetchmail home page:

	http://www.fetchmail.info/

	http://fetchmail.berlios.de/

Enjoy!

							-- esr, ma

