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  (This file was generated from ../design-notes.html)

     __________________________________________________________________

                           Design Notes On Fetchmail

Introduction

   This document is supposed to complement Eric S. Raymond's (ESR's)
   design notes. The new maintainers don't agree with some of the
   decisions ESR made previously, and the differences and new directions
   will be laid out in this document. It is therefore a sort of a TODO
   document, until the necessary code revisions have been made.

Security

   Fetchmail was handed over in a pretty poor shape, security-wise. It
   will happily talk to the network with root privileges, use sscanf() to
   read remotely received data into fixed-length stack-based buffers
   without length limitation and so on. A full audit is required and
   security concepts will have to be applied. Random bits are:
     * code talking to the network does not require root privileges and
       needs to run without root permissions
     * all input must be validated, all strings must be length checked,
       all integers range checked
     * all types will need to be reviewed whether they are signed or
       unsigned

SMTP forwarding

   Fetchmail's multidrop and rewrite options will process addresses
   received from remote sites. Special care must be taken so these
   features cannot be abused to relay mail to foreign sites.

   ESR's attempt to make fetchmail use SMTP exclusively failed, fetchmail
   got LMTP and --mda options – the latter has a lot of flaws
   unfortunately, is inconsistent with the SMTP forwarder and needs to be
   reviewed and probably bugfixed. --mda doesn't properly work with
   multiple recipients, it cannot properly communicate errors and is best
   avoided for now.

Server-side vs. client-side state.

  Why we need client-side tracking

   ESR asserted that server-side state were essential and those persons
   repsonsible for removing the LAST command from POP3 deserved to suffer.
   ESR is right in stating that the POP3 UID tracks which messages have
   been read by this client – and that is exactly what we need to do.

   If fetchmail is supposed to retrieve all mail from a mailbox reliably,
   without being disturbed by someone occasionally using another client on
   another host, or a webmailer, or similar, then client-side tracking of
   the state is indispensable. This is also needed to match behavior to
   ETRN and ODMR or to support read-only mailboxes in --keep mode.

  Present and future

   Fetchmail supports client-side state in POP3 if the UIDL option is used
   (which is strongly recommended). Similar effort needs to be made to
   track IMAP state by means of UIDVALIDITY and UID.

   This will also mean that the UID handling code be revised an perhaps
   use one file per account or per folder.

Concurrent queries/concurrent fetchmail instances

   ESR refused to make fetchmail query multiple hosts or accounts
   concurrently, on the grounds that finer-grained locks would be hard to
   implement portably.

   The idea of using one file per folder or account to track UIDs on the
   client-side will make solving this locking problem easy – the lock can
   be placed on the UID file instead.

Multidrop issues

   Fetchmail tries to guess recipients from headers that are not routing
   relevant, for instance, To:, Cc:, or Resent-headers (which are rare
   anyways). It is important that fetchmail insists on the real envelope
   operation for multidrop. This is detailed in my article "Requisites for
   working multidrop mailboxes".

   As Terry Lambert pointed out in the FreeBSD-arch mailing list on
   2001-02-17 under the subject "UUCP must stay; fetchmail sucks",
   fetchmail performs DNS MX lookups to determine domains for which
   multidrop is valid, on the assumption that the receiving SMTP host
   upstream were the same as the IMAP or POP3 server.
     __________________________________________________________________


    Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>
  (This file was generated from ../esrs-design-notes.html)

     __________________________________________________________________

               Eric S. Raymond's former Design Notes On Fetchmail

   These notes are for the benefit of future hackers and maintainers. The
   following sections are both functional and narrative, read from
   beginning to end.

                                    History

   A direct ancestor of the fetchmail program was originally authored
   (under the name popclient) by Carl Harris <ceharris@mal.com>. I took
   over development in June 1996 and subsequently renamed the program
   `fetchmail' to reflect the addition of IMAP support and SMTP delivery.
   In early November 1996 Carl officially ended support for the last
   popclient versions.

   Before accepting responsibility for the popclient sources from Carl, I
   had investigated and used and tinkered with every other UNIX
   remote-mail forwarder I could find, including fetchpop1.9,
   PopTart-0.9.3, get-mail, gwpop, pimp-1.0, pop-perl5-1.2, popc,
   popmail-1.6 and upop. My major goal was to get a header-rewrite feature
   like fetchmail's working so I wouldn't have reply problems anymore.

   Despite having done a good bit of work on fetchpop1.9, when I found
   popclient I quickly concluded that it offered the solidest base for
   future development. I was convinced of this primarily by the presence
   of multiple-protocol support. The competition didn't do POP2/RPOP/APOP,
   and I was already having vague thoughts of maybe adding IMAP. (This
   would advance two other goals: learn IMAP and get comfortable writing
   TCP/IP client software.)

   Until popclient 3.05 I was simply following out the implications of
   Carl's basic design. He already had daemon.c in the distribution, and I
   wanted daemon mode almost as badly as I wanted the header rewrite
   feature. The other things I added were bug fixes or minor extensions.

   After 3.1, when I put in SMTP-forwarding support (more about this
   below) the nature of the project changed -- it became a
   carefully-thought-out attempt to render obsolete every other program in
   its class. The name change quickly followed.

                               The rewrite option

   MTAs ought to canonicalize the addresses of outgoing non-local mail so
   that From:, To:, Cc:, Bcc: and other address headers contain only fully
   qualified domain names. Failure to do so can break the reply function
   on many mailers. (Sendmail has an option to do this.)

   This problem only becomes obvious when a reply is generated on a
   machine different from where the message was delivered. The two
   machines will have different local username spaces, potentially leading
   to misrouted mail.

   Most MTAs (and sendmail in particular) do not canonicalize address
   headers in this way (violating RFC 1123). Fetchmail therefore has to do
   it. This is the first feature I added to the ancestral popclient.

                                 Reorganization

   The second thing I did reorganize and simplify popclient a lot. Carl
   Harris's implementation was very sound, but exhibited a kind of
   unnecessary complexity common to many C programmers. He treated the
   code as central and the data structures as support for the code. As a
   result, the code was beautiful but the data structure design ad-hoc and
   rather ugly (at least to this old LISP hacker).

   I was able to improve matters significantly by reorganizing most of the
   program around the `query' data structure and eliminating a bunch of
   global context. This especially simplified the main sequence in
   fetchmail.c and was critical in enabling the daemon mode changes.

                       IMAP support and the method table

   The next step was IMAP support. I initially wrote the IMAP code as a
   generic query driver and a method table. The idea was to have all the
   protocol-independent setup logic and flow of control in the driver, and
   the protocol-specific stuff in the method table.

   Once this worked, I rewrote the POP3 code to use the same organization.
   The POP2 code kept its own driver for a couple more releases, until I
   found sources of a POP2 server to test against (the breed seems to be
   nearly extinct).

   The purpose of this reorganization, of course, is to trivialize the
   development of support for future protocols as much as possible. All
   mail-retrieval protocols have to have pretty similar logical design by
   the nature of the task. By abstracting out that common logic and its
   interface to the rest of the program, both the common and
   protocol-specific parts become easier to understand.

   Furthermore, many kinds of new features can instantly be supported
   across all protocols by modifying the one driver module.

                        Implications of smtp forwarding

   The direction of the project changed radically when Harry Hochheiser
   sent me his scratch code for forwarding fetched mail to the SMTP port.
   I realized almost immediately that a reliable implementation of this
   feature would make all the other delivery modes obsolete.

   Why mess with all the complexity of configuring an MDA or setting up
   lock-and-append on a mailbox when port 25 is guaranteed to be there on
   any platform with TCP/IP support in the first place? Especially when
   this means retrieved mail is guaranteed to look like normal sender-
   initiated SMTP mail, which is really what we want anyway.

   Clearly, the right thing to do was (1) hack SMTP forwarding support
   into the generic driver, (2) make it the default mode, and (3)
   eventually throw out all the other delivery modes.

   I hesitated over step 3 for some time, fearing to upset long-time
   popclient users dependent on the alternate delivery mechanisms. In
   theory, they could immediately switch to .forward files or their
   non-sendmail equivalents to get the same effects. In practice the
   transition might have been messy.

   But when I did it (see the NEWS note on the great options massacre) the
   benefits proved huge. The cruftiest parts of the driver code vanished.
   Configuration got radically simpler -- no more grovelling around for
   the system MDA and user's mailbox, no more worries about whether the
   underlying OS supports file locking.

   Also, the only way to lose mail vanished. If you specified localfolder
   and the disk got full, your mail got lost. This can't happen with SMTP
   forwarding because your SMTP listener won't return OK unless the
   message can be spooled or processed.

   Also, performance improved (though not so you'd notice it in a single
   run). Another not insignificant benefit of this change was that the
   manual page got a lot simpler.

   Later, I had to bring --mda back in order to allow handling of some
   obscure situations involving dynamic SLIP. But I found a much simpler
   way to do it.

   The moral? Don't hesitate to throw away superannuated features when you
   can do it without loss of effectiveness. I tanked a couple I'd added
   myself and have no regrets at all. As Saint-Exupery said, "Perfection
   [in design] is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but
   rather when there is nothing more to take away." This program isn't
   perfect, but it's trying.

        The most-requested features that I will never add, and why not:

Password encryption in .fetchmailrc

   The reason there's no facility to store passwords encrypted in the
   .fetchmailrc file is because this doesn't actually add protection.

   Anyone who's acquired the 0600 permissions needed to read your
   .fetchmailrc file will be able to run fetchmail as you anyway -- and if
   it's your password they're after, they'd be able to rip the necessary
   decoder out of the fetchmail code itself to get it.

   All .fetchmailrc encryption would do is give a false sense of security
   to people who don't think very hard.

Truly concurrent queries to multiple hosts

   Occasionally I get a request for this on "efficiency" grounds. These
   people aren't thinking either. True concurrency would do nothing to
   lessen fetchmail's total IP volume. The best it could possibly do is
   change the usage profile to shorten the duration of the active part of
   a poll cycle at the cost of increasing its demand on IP volume per unit
   time.

   If one could thread the protocol code so that fetchmail didn't block on
   waiting for a protocol response, but rather switched to trying to
   process another host query, one might get an efficiency gain (close to
   constant loading at the single-host level).

   Fortunately, I've only seldom seen a server that incurred significant
   wait time on an individual response. I judge the gain from this not
   worth the hideous complexity increase it would require in the code.

Multiple concurrent instances of fetchmail

   Fetchmail locking is on a per-invoking-user because finer-grained locks
   would be really hard to implement in a portable way. The problem is
   that you don't want two fetchmails querying the same site for the same
   remote user at the same time.

   To handle this optimally, multiple fetchmails would have to associate a
   system-wide semaphore with each active pair of a remote user and host
   canonical address. A fetchmail would have to block until getting this
   semaphore at the start of a query, and release it at the end of a
   query.

   This would be way too complicated to do just for an "it might be nice"
   feature. Instead, you can run a single root fetchmail polling for
   multiple users in either single-drop or multidrop mode.

   The fundamental problem here is how an instance of fetchmail polling
   host foo can assert that it's doing so in a way visible to all other
   fetchmails. System V semaphores would be ideal for this purpose, but
   they're not portable.

   I've thought about this a lot and roughed up several designs. All are
   complicated and fragile, with a bunch of the standard problems (what
   happens if a fetchmail aborts before clearing its semaphore, and how do
   we recover reliably?).

   I'm just not satisfied that there's enough functional gain here to pay
   for the large increase in complexity that adding these semaphores would
   entail.

                          Multidrop and alias handling

   I decided to add the multidrop support partly because some users were
   clamoring for it, but mostly because I thought it would shake bugs out
   of the single-drop code by forcing me to deal with addressing in full
   generality. And so it proved.

   There are two important aspects of the features for handling
   multiple-drop aliases and mailing lists which future hackers should be
   careful to preserve.
    1. The logic path for single-recipient mailboxes doesn't involve
       header parsing or DNS lookups at all. This is important -- it means
       the code for the most common case can be much simpler and more
       robust.
    2. The multidrop handing does not rely on doing the equivalent of
       passing the message to sendmail -t. Instead, it explicitly mines
       members of a specified set of local usernames out of the header.
    3. We do not attempt delivery to multidrop mailboxes in the presence
       of DNS errors. Before each multidrop poll we probe DNS to see if we
       have a nameserver handy. If not, the poll is skipped. If DNS
       crashes during a poll, the error return from the next nameserver
       lookup aborts message delivery and ends the poll. The daemon mode
       will then quietly spin until DNS comes up again, at which point it
       will resume delivering mail.

   When I designed this support, I was terrified of doing anything that
   could conceivably cause a mail loop (you should be too). That's why the
   code as written can only append local names (never @-addresses) to the
   recipients list.

   The code in mxget.c is nasty, no two ways about it. But it's utterly
   necessary, there are a lot of MX pointers out there. It really ought to
   be a (documented!) entry point in the bind library.

                               DNS error handling

   Fetchmail's behavior on DNS errors is to suppress forwarding and
   deletion of the individual message that each occurs in, leaving it
   queued on the server for retrieval on a subsequent poll. The assumption
   is that DNS errors are transient, due to temporary server outages.

   Unfortunately this means that if a DNS error is permanent a message can
   be perpetually stuck in the server mailbox. We've had a couple bug
   reports of this kind due to subtle RFC822 parsing errors in the
   fetchmail code that resulted in impossible things getting passed to the
   DNS lookup routines.

   Alternative ways to handle the problem: ignore DNS errors (treating
   them as a non-match on the mailserver domain), or forward messages with
   errors to fetchmail's invoking user in addition to any other
   recipients. These would fit an assumption that DNS lookup errors are
   likely to be permanent problems associated with an address.

                                 IPv6 and IPSEC

   The IPv6 support patches are really more protocol-family independence
   patches. Because of this, in most places, "ports" (numbers) have been
   replaced with "services" (strings, that may be digits). This allows us
   to run with certain protocols that use strings as "service names" where
   we in the IP world think of port numbers. Someday we'll plumb strings
   all over and then, if inet6 is not enabled, do a getservbyname() down
   in SocketOpen. The IPv6 support patches use getaddrinfo(), which is a
   POSIX p1003.1g mandated function. So, in the not too distant future,
   we'll zap the ifdefs and just let autoconf check for getaddrinfo. IPv6
   support comes pretty much automatically once you have protocol family
   independence.

                              Internationalization

   Internationalization is handled using GNU gettext (see the file
   ABOUT_NLS in the source distribution). This places some minor
   constraints on the code.

   Strings that must be subject to translation should be wrapped with
   GT_() or N_() -- the former in function arguments, the latter in static
   initializers and other non-function-argument contexts.

                          Checklist for Adding Options

   Adding a control option is not complicated in principle, but there are
   a lot of fiddly details in the process. You'll need to do the following
   minimum steps.
     * Add a field to represent the control in struct run, struct query,
       or struct hostdata.
     * Go to rcfile_y.y. Add the token to the grammar. Don't forget the
       %token declaration.
     * Pick an actual string to declare the option in the .fetchmailrc
       file. Add the token to rcfile_l.
     * Pick a long-form option name, and a one-letter short option if any
       are left. Go to options.c. Pick a new LA_ value. Hack the
       longoptions table to set up the association. Hack the big switch
       statement to set the option. Hack the `?' message to describe it.
     * If the default is nonzero, set it in def_opts near the top of
       load_params in fetchmail.c.
     * Add code to dump the option value in fetchmail.c:dump_params.
     * For a per-site or per-user option, add proper FLAG_MERGE actions in
       fetchmail.c's optmerge() function. For a global option, add an
       override at the end of load_params; this will involve copying a
       "cmd_run." field to a corresponding "run." field, see the existing
       code for models.
     * Document the option in fetchmail.man. This will require at least
       two changes; one to the collected table of options, and one full
       text description of the option.
     * Hack fetchmailconf to configure it. Bump the fetchmailconf version.
     * Hack conf.c to dump the option so we won't have a version-skew
       problem.
     * Add an entry to NEWS.
     * If the option implements a new feature, add a note to the feature
       list.

   There may be other things you have to do in the way of logic, of
   course.

   Before you implement an option, though, think hard. Is there any way to
   make fetchmail automatically detect the circumstances under which it
   should change its behavior? If so, don't write an option. Just do the
   check!

                                Lessons learned

  1. Server-side state is essential

   The person(s) responsible for removing LAST from POP3 deserve to
   suffer. Without it, a client has no way to know which messages in a box
   have been read by other means, such as an MUA running on the server.

   The POP3 UID feature described in RFC1725 to replace LAST is
   insufficient. The only problem it solves is tracking which messages
   have been read by this client -- and even that requires tricky, fragile
   implementation.

   The underlying lesson is that maintaining accessible server-side `seen'
   state bits associated with Status headers is indispensible in a
   Unix/RFC822 mail server protocol. IMAP gets this right.

  2. Readable text protocol transactions are a Good Thing

   A nice thing about the general class of text-based protocols that SMTP,
   POP2, POP3, and IMAP belongs to is that client/server transactions are
   easy to watch and transaction code correspondingly easy to debug. Given
   a decent layer of socket utility functions (which Carl provided) it's
   easy to write protocol engines and not hard to show that they're
   working correctly.

   This is an advantage not to be despised! Because of it, this project
   has been interesting and fun -- no serious or persistent bugs, no long
   hours spent looking for subtle pathologies.

  3. IMAP is a Good Thing.

   Now that there is a standard IMAP equivalent of the POP3 APOP
   validation in CRAM-MD5, POP3 is completely obsolete.

  4. SMTP is the Right Thing

   In retrospect it seems clear that this program (and others like it)
   should have been designed to forward via SMTP from the beginning. This
   lesson may be applicable to other Unix programs that now call the local
   MDA/MTA as a program.

  5. Syntactic noise can be your friend

   The optional `noise' keywords in the rc file syntax started out as a
   late-night experiment. The English-like syntax they allow is
   considerably more readable than the traditional terse keyword-value
   pairs you get when you strip them all out. I think there may be a wider
   lesson here.

                           Motivation and validation

   It is truly written: the best hacks start out as personal solutions to
   the author's everyday problems, and spread because the problem turns
   out to be typical for a large class of users. So it was with Carl
   Harris and the ancestral popclient, and so with me and fetchmail.

   It's gratifying that fetchmail has become so popular. Until just before
   1.9 I was designing strictly to my own taste. The multi-drop mailbox
   support and the new --limit option were the first features to go in
   that I didn't need myself.

   By 1.9, four months after I started hacking on popclient and a month
   after the first fetchmail release, there were literally a hundred
   people on the fetchmail-friends contact list. That's pretty powerful
   motivation. And they were a good crowd, too, sending fixes and
   intelligent bug reports in volume. A user population like that is a
   gift from the gods, and this is my expression of gratitude.

   The beta testers didn't know it at the time, but they were also the
   subjects of a sociological experiment. The results are described in my
   paper, The Cathedral And The Bazaar.

                                    Credits

   Special thanks go to Carl Harris, who built a good solid code base and
   then tolerated me hacking it out of recognition. And to Harry
   Hochheiser, who gave me the idea of the SMTP-forwarding delivery mode.

   Other significant contributors to the code have included Dave Bodenstab
   (error.c code and --syslog), George Sipe (--monitor and --interface),
   Gordon Matzigkeit (netrc.c), Al Longyear (UIDL support), Chris Hanson
   (Kerberos V4 support), and Craig Metz (OPIE, IPv6, IPSEC).

                                   Conclusion

   At this point, the fetchmail code appears to be pretty stable. It will
   probably undergo substantial change only if and when support for a new
   retrieval protocol or authentication method is added.

                                 Relevant RFCS

   Not all of these describe standards explicitly used in fetchmail, but
   they all shaped the design in one way or another.

   RFC821
          SMTP protocol

   RFC822
          Mail header format

   RFC937
          Post Office Protocol - Version 2

   RFC974
          MX routing

   RFC976
          UUCP mail format

   RFC1081
          Post Office Protocol - Version 3

   RFC1123
          Host requirements (modifies 821, 822, and 974)

   RFC1176
          Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 2

   RFC1203
          Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 3

   RFC1225
          Post Office Protocol - Version 3

   RFC1344
          Implications of MIME for Internet Mail Gateways

   RFC1413
          Identification server

   RFC1428
          Transition of Internet Mail from Just-Send-8 to 8-bit SMTP/MIME

   RFC1460
          Post Office Protocol - Version 3

   RFC1508
          Generic Security Service Application Program Interface

   RFC1521
          MIME: Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions

   RFC1869
          SMTP Service Extensions (ESMTP spec)

   RFC1652
          SMTP Service Extension for 8bit-MIMEtransport

   RFC1725
          Post Office Protocol - Version 3

   RFC1730
          Interactive Mail Access Protocol - Version 4

   RFC1731
          IMAP4 Authentication Mechanisms

   RFC1732
          IMAP4 Compatibility With IMAP2 And IMAP2bis

   RFC1734
          POP3 AUTHentication command

   RFC1870
          SMTP Service Extension for Message Size Declaration

   RFC1891
          SMTP Service Extension for Delivery Status Notifications

   RFC1892
          The Multipart/Report Content Type for the Reporting of Mail
          System Administrative Messages

   RFC1894
          An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications

   RFC1893
          Enhanced Mail System Status Codes

   RFC1894
          An Extensible Message Format for Delivery Status Notifications

   RFC1938
          A One-Time Password System

   RFC1939
          Post Office Protocol - Version 3

   RFC1957
          Some Observations on Implementations of the Post Office Protocol
          (POP3)

   RFC1985
          SMTP Service Extension for Remote Message Queue Starting

   RFC2033
          Local Mail Transfer Protocol

   RFC2060
          Internet Message Access Protocol - Version 4rev1

   RFC2061
          IMAP4 Compatibility With IMAP2bis

   RFC2062
          Internet Message Access Protocol - Obsolete Syntax

   RFC2195
          IMAP/POP AUTHorize Extension for Simple Challenge/Response

   RFC2177
          IMAP IDLE command

   RFC2449
          POP3 Extension Mechanism

   RFC2554
          SMTP Service Extension for Authentication

   RFC2595
          Using TLS with IMAP, POP3 and ACAP

   RFC2645
          On-Demand Mail Relay: SMTP with Dynamic IP Addresses

   RFC2683
          IMAP4 Implementation Recommendations

   RFC2821
          Simple Mail Transfer Protocol

   RFC2822
          Internet Message Format

                             Other useful documents

   http://www.faqs.org/faqs/LANs/mail-protocols/
          LAN Mail Protocols Summary
     __________________________________________________________________


    Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
