Fetchmail

Last updated
Fetchmail
Original author(s) Eric S. Raymond
Stable release
6.4.39 [1]   OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg / 20 July 2024;2 months ago (20 July 2024)
Repository
Operating system Unix-like
Type Mail delivery agent
License GNU General Public License
Website www.fetchmail.info

Fetchmail is an open-source software utility for POSIX-compliant operating systems which is used to retrieve e-mail from a remote POP3, IMAP, or ODMR mail server to the user's local system. It was developed from the popclient program, written by Carl Harris. [2]

Contents

Its chief significance is perhaps that its author, Eric S. Raymond, used it as a model to discuss his theories of open-source software development in a widely read and influential essay on software development methodologies The Cathedral and the Bazaar .

Design

By design, Fetchmail's only means of delivering messages is by submitting them to the local MTA/Message transfer agent or invoking a mail delivery agent [3] like procmail, maildrop, or sendmail; delivering directly to mail folders such as maildir is not supported.

It is a C program evolved by gradual mutation from an ancestor already written in C. [4]

Dan Bernstein, getmail creator Charles Cazabon and FreeBSD developer Terry Lambert, have criticized Fetchmail's design, [5] its number of security holes, [6] and that it was prematurely put into "maintenance mode". In 2004, a new team of maintainers took over Fetchmail development, [7] and laid out development plans that broke with design decisions that Eric Raymond had made in earlier versions. [8]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eric S. Raymond</span> American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

Eric Steven Raymond, 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 Roguelike game NetHack. In the 1990s, he edited and updated the Jargon File, published as The New Hacker's Dictionary.

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 RFC 9051.

<i>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</i> Book by Eric S. Raymond

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It examines the struggle between top-down and bottom-up design. The essay was first presented by Raymond at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 in Würzburg (Germany) and was published as the second chapter of the same‑titled book in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sendmail</span> Open-source mail transfer agent

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maildir</span> E-mail format

The Maildir e-mail format is a common way of storing email messages on a file system, rather than in a database. Each message is assigned a file with a unique name, and each mail folder is a file system directory containing these files. Maildir was designed by Daniel J. Bernstein circa 1995, with a major goal of eliminating the need for program code to handle file locking and unlocking through use of the local filesystem. Maildir design reflects the fact that the only operations valid for an email message is that it be created, deleted or have its status changed in some way.

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. It is also called a local delivery agent (LDA).

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.

Mark Reed Crispin is best known as the father of the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), having invented it in 1985 during his time at the Stanford Knowledge Systems Laboratory. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs and was the principal author of UW IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. He also designed the MIX mail storage format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kontact</span> Personal information manager software

Kontact is a personal information manager and groupware software suite developed by KDE. It supports calendars, contacts, notes, to-do lists, news, and email. It offers a number of inter-changeable graphical UIs all built on top of a common core.

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 (multidrop) mailboxes, mail filtering via any arbitrary program, and supports a wide variety of mail destination types, including mboxrd, maildir, and external arbitrary mail delivery agents. Unlike fetchmail, getmail's Python foundation makes it nearly immune to buffer overflow security holes. It also has a simpler configuration syntax than fetchmail, but supports fewer authentication protocols. The software can also function as a basic mail delivery agent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dovecot (software)</span>

Dovecot is an open-source IMAP and POP3 server for Unix-like operating systems, written primarily with security in mind. Timo Sirainen originated Dovecot and first released it in July 2002. Dovecot developers primarily aim to produce a lightweight, fast and easy-to-set-up open-source email server.

Open-source software development (OSSD) is the process by which open-source software, or similar software whose source code is publicly available, is developed by an open-source software project. These are software products available with its source code under an open-source license to study, change, and improve its design. Examples of some popular open-source software products are Mozilla Firefox, Google Chromium, Android, LibreOffice and the VLC media player.

The UW IMAP server was the reference server implementation of the Internet Message Access Protocol. It was developed at the University of Washington by Mark Crispin and others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roundcube</span> Open-source web-based IMAP email client

Roundcube is a web-based IMAP email client. Roundcube's most prominent feature is the pervasive use of Ajax technology. Roundcube is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL-3.0-or-later), with exceptions for skins and plugins.

Push email is an email system that provides an always-on capability, in which when new email arrives at the mail delivery agent (MDA), it is immediately, actively transferred (pushed) by the MDA to the mail user agent (MUA), also called the email client, so that the end-user can see incoming email immediately. This is in contrast with systems that check for new incoming mail every so often, on a schedule. Email clients include smartphones and, less strictly, IMAP personal computer mail applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citadel/UX</span>

Citadel is a collaboration suite that is directly descended from the Citadel family of programs which became popular in the 1980s and 1990s as a bulletin board system platform. It is designed to run on open source operating systems such as Linux or BSD. Although it is being used for many bulletin board systems, in 1998 the developers began to expand its functionality to a general purpose groupware platform.

The comparison of mail servers covers mail transfer agents (MTAs), mail delivery agents, and other computer software that provide e-mail services.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alpine (email client)</span> Email client

Alpine is a free software email client developed at the University of Washington.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Email agent (infrastructure)</span>

An e-mail agent is a program that is part of the e-mail infrastructure, from composition by sender, to transfer across the network, to viewing by recipient. The best-known are message user agents and message transfer agents, but finer divisions exist.

fdm is a mail delivery agent and email filtering software for Unix-like operating systems, similar to fetchmail and procmail. It was started in 2006 by Nicholas Marriott who later also started tmux in 2007.

References

  1. Matthias Andree (20 July 2024). "fetchmail 6.4.39 is available (two bugfixes)" . Retrieved 11 September 2024.
  2. Raymond, Eric. "Eric S. Raymond's former Design Notes On Fetchmail" . Retrieved 2007-04-03.
  3. "...or into an MDA program...", Section G1, The Fetchmail FAQ.
  4. Richardson, Anthony (2004). "An Online Unix System Programming Course For Computer Engineering Students". 2004 Annual Conference Proceedings. ASEE Conferences: 9.197.1–9.197.10. doi: 10.18260/1-2--13866 .
  5. Lambert, Terry. "UUCP must stay; fetchmail sucks (was list 'o things)" . Retrieved 2007-04-05.
  6. Cazabon, Charles. "getmail frequently asked questions" . Retrieved 2007-04-05.
  7. "Developer History" . Retrieved 2007-04-05.
  8. "Design Notes On Fetchmail" . Retrieved 2007-04-05.

https://sourceforge.net/directory/os:windows/?q=fetchmail