   (This document was generated from fetchmail-FAQ.html)

   Back to Fetchmail Home Page To Site Map $Date: 1997/08/11 20:03:53 $
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
                  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@snark.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. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?
   G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?
   
                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 migrating from popclient. How do I need to modify my .poprc?
   
                           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 get fetchmail to work with ssh?
   C5. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam 571 response?
   C6. How can I do automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail when I may
   have multiple login sessions going?
   
                   Configuration tips for non-sendmail MTAs
                                       
   T1. How can I use fetchmail with qmail?
   T2. How can I use fetchmail with exim?
   T3. How can I use fetchmail with smail?
   T4. How can I use fetchmail with Lotus Notes?
   
                             Runtime fatal errors:
                                       
   R1. I think I've set up fetchmail correctly, but I'm not getting any
   mail.
   R2. Fetchmail isn't working, and -v shows `SMTP connect failed'
   messages.
   R3. When I try to configure an MDA, fetchmail doesn't work.
   R4. Fetchmail dumps core in -V mode, but operates normally otherwise.
   R5. Mail that was being fetched when I interrupted my fetchmail seems
   to have been vanished. R6. Fetchmail dumps core when I use a .netrc
   file but works otherwise.
   R7. All my mail seems to disappear after an interrupt.
   
                           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?
   
                                 Mangled mail:
                                       
   X1. Why is fetched mail being logged with my name, not the real From
   address?
   X2. Spurious blank lines are appearing in the headers of fetched mail.
   X3. My mail client can't see a Subject line.
   X4. Messages containing "From" at start of line are being split.
   
                                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.
   
                                   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. Extensive testing by a large,
   multi-platform user community has shown that it is as near bulletproof
   as the underlying protocols permit.
   
   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://www.ccil.org/~esr/fetchmail. You can also 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. When reporting bugs, please include the following:
    1. Your operating system and compiler version.
    2. Any command-line options you used.
    3. The output of fetchmail -V called with whatever other command-line
       options you used.
       
   It is helpful if you include your .fetchmailrc, but not necessary
   unless your symptom seems to involve an error in configuration
   parsing.
   
   A transcript of the failed session with -v on is almost always useful.
   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

   and then rebuild in order to generate a version that can br
   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 mailagent on the
   server side and (if you're the server sysadmin) sendmail.cf domain
   exclusions. 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.
   
   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. Is there a mailing list for exchanging tips?

   There is a fetchmail-friends list for people who want to discuss fixes
   and improvements in fetchmail and help co-develop it.
   
   The list is at fetchmail-friends@thyrsus.com and is a SmartList
   reflector; sign up in the usual way with a message containing the word
   "subscribe" in the subject line sent to to
   fetchmail-friends-request@thyrsus.com. (Similarly, "unsubscribe" in
   the Subject line unsubscribes you, and "help" returns general list
   help).
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
G6. So, what's this I hear about a fetchmail paper?

   Now it can be told! 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.
   
   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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
F1. Why does my old .fetchmailrc file no longer work?

  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:
  
   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.

   So put string quotes around it. :-)
   
   The configuration file parser treats any all-numeric token as a
   number, which will confuse it when it's expecting a name. String
   quoting forces the token's class.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
F3. The .fetchmailrc parser won't accept my host or username beginning with
`no'.

   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.).
   
   You can work around this easily. Just put string quotes around your
   token.
   
   I haven't fixed this because there is no good fix for it short of
   implementing a token pushback stack in the lexer. That's more
   additional complexity than I'm willing to add to banish a very
   marginal bug with an easy workaround.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
F4. I'm migrating from popclient. How do I need to modify my .poprc?

   If you have been using popclient (the ancestor of this program) at
   version 3.0b6 or later, start with this
   
(cd ~; mv ~/.poprc ~/.fetchmailrc)

   in order to migrate. Be aware that some of popclient's unnecessary
   options have been removed (see the NOTES file in the distribution for
   explanation). You can't deliver to a local mail file anymore or to
   standard output any more, and using an MDA for delivery is
   discouraged. If you throw those options away, fetchmail will now
   forward your mail into your system's normal Internet-mail delivery
   path.
   
   Actually, using an MDA is now almost always the wrong thing; the MDA
   facility has been retained only for people who can't or won't run a
   sendmail-like SMTP listener on port 25. The default, SMTP forwarding
   to port 25, is better for at least two major reasons. One: it feeds
   retrieved POP and IMAP mail into your system's normal delivery path
   along with local mail and normal Internet mail, so all your normal
   filtering/aliasing/forwarding setup for local mail works. Two: because
   the port 25 listener returns a positive acknowledge, fetchmail can be
   sure you're not going to lose mail to a disk-full or some other
   resource-exhaustion problem.
   
   If you used to use -mda "procmail -d _<you>_" or something similar,
   forward to port 25 and do "| procmail -d _<you>_" in your ~/.forward
   file.
   
   As long as your new .fetchmailrc file does not use the removed
   `localfolder' option or `limit' (which now takes a maximum byte size
   rather than a line count), a straight move or copy of your .poprc will
   often work. (The new run control file syntax also has to be a little
   stricter about the order of options than the old, in order to support
   multiple user descriptions per server; thus you may have to rearrange
   things a bit.)
   
   Run control files in the minimal .poprc format (without the `username'
   token) will trigger a warning. To eliminate this warning, add the
   `username' keyword before your first user entry per server (it is
   already required before second and subsequent user entries per server.
   
   In some future version the `username' keyword will be required.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
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' (ie. 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?

   Fetchmail versions before 2.3 actually used SIGHUP as a wakeup signal.
   Newer versions use SIGUSR1 for wakeup (and SIGHUP only in
   background-daemon mode) in order to avoid any potential confusion
   about logout-time behavior. The right way to dispatch fetchmail on
   logout 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
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). 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 ', where 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 get fetchmail to work with ssh?

   We have two recipes for this. The first is a little easier to set up,
   but only supports one user at a time.
   
   First, a lightly edited version of a recipe from Masafumi NAKANE:
   
   1. You must have ssh (the ssh client) on the local host and sshd (ssh
   server) on the remote mail server. And you have to configure ssh so
   you can login to the sshd server host without a password. (Refer to
   ssh man page for several authentication methods.)
   
   2. Add something like following to your .fetchmailrc file:
   
poll mailhost port 1234 via localhost with pop3:
        preconnect "ssh -f -L 1234:mailhost:110 mailhost sleep 20 /dev/null";

   (Note that 1234 can be an arbitrary port number. Privileged ports can
   be specified only by root.) The effect of this ssh command is to
   forward connections made to localhost port 1234 (in above example) to
   mailhost's 110.
   
   This configuration will enable secure mail transfer. All the
   conversation between fetchmail and remote pop server will be
   encrypted.
   
   If sshd is not running on the remote mail server, you can specify
   intermediate host running it. If you do this, however, communication
   between the machine running sshd and the POP server will not be
   encrypted. And the preconnect line would be like this:
   
preconnect "ssh -f -L 1234:mailhost:110 sshdhost sleep 20 /dev/null"

   You can work this trick with IMAP too, but the port number 110 in the
   above would need to become 143.
   
   Second, a recipe frm Charlie Brady <cbrady@ind.tansu.com.au>. Charlie
   says: "The [previous] recipe certainly works, but the solution I post
   here is better in a few respects":
     * this method will not fail if two or more users attempt to use
       fetchmail simultaneously.
     * you are able to use the full facilities of tcpd to control access
     * this method does not depend on the preconnect feature of
       fetchmail, so can be used for tunneling of other services as well.
       
   Here are the steps:
    1. Make sure that the "socket" program is installed on the server
       machine.
    2. Set up an unprivileged account on your system with a .ssh
       directory containing an SSH identity file "identity" with no pass
       phrase, "identity.pub" and "known_hosts" containing the host key
       of your mailhost. Let's call this account "noddy".
    3. On mailhost, set up no-password access for noddy@yourhost. Add to
       your SSH authorised_keys file:

command="socket localhost 110",no-port-forwarding 1024 ......
   where "1024 ......" is the content of noddy's identity.pub file.
    4. Create a script /usr/local/bin/ssh.fm and make it executable:

#! /bin/sh
exec ssh -q -C -l your.login.id -e none mailhost socket localhost 110
    5. Add an entry in inetd.conf for whatever port you choose to use -
       say:

1234 stream tcp nowait noddy /usr/sbin/tcpd /usr/local/bin/ssh.fm
    6. Send a HUP signal to your inetd.
       
   Now just use localhost:1234 to access your POP server.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
C5. How can I set up support for sendmail's anti-spam 571 response?

   Rachel Polanskis writes:
   
   Basically you need to use the "check_*" rules in sendmail. These are
   rules introduced since version 8.8.2
   
   The idea is to generate a list of domains and addresses that are
   placed into a file - I call mine "sendmail.rej" and you place just one
   domain or email address on each line. During the SMTP transaction,
   this file is checked and if there is a match, the message is refused,
   with a suitable "Service not available" message sent back to the
   sender.
   
   With the feature enabled in fetchmail, the mail is simply deleted,
   with no further processing.
   
   The only drawback when blocking spam with fetchmail is that you do not
   get the satisfaction of sending an error back to the sender.
   
   To actually use the check_mail rules in sendmail 8.8.2 or better, you
   need to know how to generate a sendmail.cf file from the m4 config
   files distributed with sendmail.
   
   The actual rules can be found at the following URLS:
   
   http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/%7Eca/email/check.html
   
   This one is by Claus Aßman, who has documented more of sendmail then I
   can digest! The actual setup I used though was by David Begley, who
   has put together a WWW page describing how to quickly implement these
   rules yourself.
   
   http://www.nepean.uws.edu.au/users/david/pe/blockmail.html
   
   David's pages could be moving shortly. I will post an update if it
   happens.
   
   Remember, when copying these rulesets off the web, that there are tabs
   embedded in them, that may not be preserved. You _must_ reintroduce
   these tabs into the rules to make them work properly.
   
   Once you have your ruleset in place, and have generated a nice
   sendmail.cf file, and the list of blocked sites, try telneting to your
   SMTP port to test it, and send a message with a blocked address in it.
   
   You should see a message similar to:
   
     "571 unsolicited email is refused"

   Next, if you have access to a host that you can send mail from, that
   is _not_ your mail host, add that host to your spamlist and restart
   sendmail.
   
   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!!!
   
   The check_ rules work, and they work well. Coupled with fetchmail's
   ability to respond to the appropriate error messages, you can be
   assured of never seeing a spam from any address you put in the reject
   list.
   
   The only thing that is missing, as mentioned previously, is the
   ability to allow sendmail to process the message further and generate
   an error message to the sender.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
C6. How can I do automatic startup/shutdown of fetchmail when I 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
T1. 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 setup 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 deliver 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
T2. How can I use fetchmail with exim?

   By default, the exim listener enforces the the 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).
   
   Fetchmail always passes fully qualified RCPT TO addresses. But 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.
   
   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).
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
T3. 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
T4. 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 intuitive. Use `forcecr'.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
R1. 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 the next question.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
R2. 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.
   
   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 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 recent 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
R3. 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 X2.)
   
   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.
   
   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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
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 by fetchmail, either).
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
R5. 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 acknowledgement from the SMTP
   listener, or (b) it gets an error 571 (the spam-filter error) from the
   listener. No interrupt can cause it to lose mail.
   
   However, POP3 has a design problem in that its servers mark 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 POP3 fetch options.
   
   Solution: switch to an IMAP server.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
R6. Fetchmail dumps core when I use a .netrc file but works otherwise.

   We have a report that under Solaris 2.5 using gcc-2.7.2, if fetchmail
   is compiled with -O or -O2, it segfaults on startup when reading a
   .netrc.
   
   You can work around this by disabling optimization.
   
   There may be an actual bug here that the optimizer exposes; the stack
   trace says the segfault is in free() and has all the earmarks of a
   heap- corruption screw. But the symptom doesn't reproduce under Linux
   with the same .fetchmailrc and .netrc.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
R7. All my mail seems to disappear after an interrupt.

   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.
   
   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 brfore 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 an QUIT -- this is a technical violation of the
   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.)
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
M1. I've declared local names, but all my multidrop mail is going to root
anyway.

   Somehow your fetchmail is never matching the hostname part of
   recipient names to the name of the mailserver machine. This probably
   means it is unable to recognize hostname parts as being DNS names of
   the mailserver, and indicates 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
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 mode to trigger SMTP sends periodically (of course, this means
   you have to poll more frequently than the mailserver's expiry 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 addess 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
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 R2!) who
   solved this problem by removing the reference to -lresolv from his
   link line and relinking. Apparently in some recent 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 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 dames,
   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
     
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
X1. 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!
   
   In versions up to 1.9.9 this led to pesky errors at some sites.
   Because of this, I hacked 2.0 to just use the calling user ID as the
   MAIL FROM address.
   
   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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
X2. 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
X3. My mail client can't see a Subject line.

   First, see X2. 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
X4. 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 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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
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 doen'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.
   
     _________________________________________________________________
                                      
   Back to Fetchmail Home Page To Site Map $Date: 1997/08/11 20:03:53 $
   
   
    Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
