			 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 standard all mail-retrieval protocols in use on the
Internet: POP2, POP3 (including POP3 with RFC1938 one-time passwords),
RPOP, APOP, KPOP, Compuserve's POP3 with RPA, all flavors of IMAP
(including IMAP4rev1 with RFC1731 Kerberos v4  or GSSAPI authentication),
and ESMTP ETRN.

The fetchmail code was developed under Linux, but has also been
extensively tested under 4.4BSD, AIX, HP-UX versions 9 and 10, 
SunOS, Solaris, NEXTSTEP, and OSF 3.2.  

It should be readily portable to other Unix variants (it uses GNU
autoconf).  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.

A beta OS/2 port of fetchmail is available from Jason F. McBrayer at 
http://studentweb.tulane.edu/%7Ejmcbray/os2.

Fetchmail is Y2K safe.

See the distribution files FEATURES for a full list of features, NEWS
for detailed information on recent changes and NOTES for design notes.

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.

You can easily fetch the latest version of fetchmail via FTP from the
following FTP directory:

	ftp://ftp.ccil.org/pub/esr/fetchmail

Or you can get it from the fetchmail home page:

	http://www.ccil.org/~esr/fetchmail

Enjoy!

							-- esr

