[Fetchmail-announce] ANNOUNCE: The 7.0.0-alpha7 release of fetchmail is available

[Matthias A. <mat...@gm...>]

Greetings,

The 7.0.0-alpha7 release of fetchmail is now available at the usual locations,
including <https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_7-alpha/>.

This is to have a tarball-based reference point, alpha6 had, well, aged quite a bit.

The source archive is available at:
<https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_7-alpha/fetchmail-7.0.0-alpha7.tar.xz/download>

Here are the release notes:

fetchmail-7.0.0 (not yet released):

NOTE THIS IS AN ALPHA RELEASE THAT HAS NOT BEEN THOROUGHLY TESTED!
XXX and FIXME - see the big merge of 2019-08-25, and 2021-01-03

# INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES
* The SSL/TLS options were massively changed and disentangled, to be clearer.
* --sslmode starttls=must is now the default as a consequence of the previous 
  sslcertck default.
  If you need an unencrypted connection, use --sslmode none.
  If you need an SSL-wrapped connection that starts immediately on a 
  separate port, use --sslmode wrapped.
* See the REMOVED FEATURES section below for further incompatibilities.

# MAJOR CHANGES
* The POP3 code now always uses UIDL, except if "fetchall" is in effect.
  Fixes BerliOS Bug #16172. Fixes Debian Bug#345788. The --uidl option
  is now gone.

# FEATURES ADDED
* fetchmail has initial support for OAUTH2, courtesy of Matthew M. Ogilvie.  
  This requires a helper script (in Python) that ships in the contrib/ section.
* Fetchmail can now retrieve credentials from PWMD. This needs to be enabled at 
  compile-time and requires run-time configuration. See README.PWMD for details.
  Contributed by Ben Kibbey, author of libpwmd and pwmd.
* Fetchmail can now run an external command to retrieve credentials 
  (passwords), see the fetchmail man page for passwordeval.
* Fetchmail now supports a retrieve-error command line or rcfile option that 
  takes exactly one argument, abort (default), continue or markseen.  This 
  specifies the policy used by fetchmail to handle messages whose bodies fail 
  to be retrieved due to server errors.  Both the continue and markseen options 
  will skip the message with errors and allow the session to continue so that 
  subsequent messages can be retrieved.  The markseen option will also mark the 
  message with errors as seen.
  The default policy is to abort the session whenever a server error occurs. 
  Contributed by Craig Brown.
* Fetchmailconf offers CRAM-MD5 and APOP authentication. XXX FIXME: check
* The SSL/TLS/STARTTLS operation mode is now selected through a new --sslmode 
  option, which cleans up the incomprehensible --ssl and --sslproto mess of 
  fetchmail versions before v7.0.0.
* The SSL/TLS/STARTTLS protocol version can now be selected through a new 
  --sslprotocolversion switch.
* The SSL/TLS cipher in used is now reported in verbose mode.
* FIXME: The SHA1 fingerprint is now printed along with the MD5 digest of the 
  server's certificate; however, this can not yet be matched - matches are 
  still against MD5 only.

# REMOVED FEATURES
* IMAP2 and POP2 protocol support were removed.
* RPOP support (not actually a protocol, but a variant of POP3) was removed.
* POP3: the (--)uidl option has been removed. It is always on.
* POP3: LAST is no longer used. It was removed from POP3 in the year 1994, and 
  it could cause mail loss when the connection was interrupted or if clients 
  besides fetchmail polled the mailbox.
* The MX and host alias DNS lookups that fetchmail performs in multidrop mode 
  have been removed. They were based on the mistaken assumption that the 
  IMAP/POP3 server was also the MX server, which is rarely the case.  They have 
  never supported IPv6 (including IPv6-mapped IPv4) either.
  Non-DNS based alias keywords such as "aka" remain.
* Kerberos IV support was removed.
* The --ssl option is obsolescent and triggers a warning that users should use 
  --sslmode wrapped instead. It is understood as an alias for --sslmode 
  wrapped.
* The --sslproto option was removed. Two new options were added in its place, 
  --sslmode and --sslprotocolversion.
* A lot of outdated and/or unsafe-to-use material got dropped from contrib/.

# CHANGES
* APOP is no longer a protocol, but an authentication method. In order to use 
  it, use protocol POP3 auth APOP, or on the commandline, -p pop3 --auth apop.
  If no authentication method is specified, APOP is automatically tried if 
  offered by the server before we resort to sending the password as clear text.

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