[fetchmail-devel] why one person hates fetchmail

[Rob F. <rf...@fu...>]

This came up at LWN.net.... I thought it might be useful to bring it over 
here.  I have to admit I agree with at least a few of his complaints.

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> I'm interested in why you hate fetchmail.

Put succinctly, because I think it does not make simple things simple.
For example I would expect what I consider to be a trivial thing, get
new messages from a POP account and put them into a Maildir, to be
trivially simple, essentially something like

 fetchmail --mailbox my/maildir/path/ pop3://username:password@host

For me, getting fetchmail to do this was far from trivial, but then I
have to admit I do not find the fetchmail user interface (command line
options and configuration file) to be at all intuitive, so I may not be
understanding. I found that fetchmail did not seem to be happy about
running multiple instances at once, about delivering directly to a
Maildir, about having multiple independent POP accounts on the same
host, and about running without a configuration file, all things which I
think should just work right out of the box for a program called
"fetchmail".

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