			 fetchmail README

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

Fetchmail supports all standard mail-retrieval protocols in use on the
Internet: POP2, POP3, RPOP, APOP, KPOP, IMAP2bis, IMAP4, IMAP4rev1
ESMTP ETRN, and ODMR.  Fetchmail also fully supports authentication
via GSSAPI, Kerberos 4 and 5, RFC1938 one-time passwords, Compuserve's
POP3 with RPA, Microsoft's NTLM, Demon Internet's SDPS, or CRAM-MD5
authentication a la RFC2195.  Fetchmail also supports end-to-end
encryption with OpenSSL.

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

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

See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS
for detailed information on recent changes, NOTES for design notes, and
TODO for a list of things that still need doing.

The INSTALL file describes how to configure and install fetchmail.

The fetchmail code appears to be stable and free of bugs affecting
normal operation (that is, retrieving from POP3 or IMAP in single-drop
mode and forwarding via SMTP to sendmail).  It will probably undergo
substantial change only if and when support for a new retrieval
protocol or authentication mode is added.

If you want to hack on this code, a list of known bugs and to-do items
can be found in the file todo.html.

You can get the code from the fetchmail home page:

	http://fetchmail.berlios.de/

Enjoy!

							-- esr, ma

