[Fetchmail-devel] ANNOUNCE: The 7.0.0-alpha8 snapshot of fetchmail is available

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

Greetings,

The 7.0.0-alpha8 release of fetchmail is now available at the usual locations,
including <https://sourceforge.net/projects/fetchmail/files/branch_7-alpha/>

The source archive is available at:
<https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fetchmail/branch_7-alpha/fetchmail-7.0.0-alpha8.tar.xz/download>

It mostly merges up the recent 6.4 and 6.5 branch changes
but has a few changes of its own:

919fd787 2021-04-24 | Bump max. passwordlen to 10000 bytes. [Matthias Andree]
6357924a 2021-04-24 | po/de.po: update [Matthias Andree]
53af1ae1 2021-04-24 | Bump version to -alpha8 [Matthias Andree]
05f66769 2021-04-24 | Fix up merge error. [Matthias Andree]
d52ba965 2021-01-31 | Add README.OAUTH2 issue #27 (sourceforge/next, origin/next) [William Bader]
2a0c7680 2021-01-09 | fetchmailconf: better place for PIDfile. [Matthias Andree]
2950d204 2021-01-09 | fetchmailconf: Expose PIDfile (lockfile). [Matthias Andree]
7514a696 2021-01-05 | [conf] Print pidfile in configuration [Earl Chew]
204541b6 2021-01-03 | Add support for sslcertfile. [Matthias Andree]
81bcb126 2021-01-03 | [conf] Print sslcertfile in configuration (earlchew/fetchmail-issue/25) [Earl]

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.

# KNOWN BUGS AND WORKAROUNDS
  (This section floats upwards through the NEWS file so it stays with the 
  current release information)
* Fetchmail does not handle messages without Message-ID header well
  (See sourceforge.net bug #780933)
* Fetchmail currently uses 31-bit signed integers in several places
  where unsigned and/or wider types should have been used, for instance,
  for mailbox sizes, and misreports sizes of 2 GibiB and beyond. 
  Fixing this requires C89 compatibility to be relinquished.
* BSMTP is mostly untested and errors can cause corrupt output.
* Sun Workshop 6 (SPARC) is known to miscompile the configuration file lexer in 
  64-bit mode.  Either compile 32-bit code or use GCC to compile 64-bit 
  fetchmail.  Note that fetchmail doesn't take advantage of 64-bit code, 
  so compiling 32-bit SPARC code should not cause any difficulties.
* Fetchmail does not track pending deletes across crashes.
* The command line interface is sometimes a bit stubborn, for instance, 
  fetchmail -s doesn't work with a daemon running.
* Linux systems may return duplicates of an IP address in some circumstances if 
  no or no global IPv6 addresses are configured.
  (No workaround. Ubuntu Bug#582585, Novell Bug#606980.)
* Kerberos 5 may be broken, particularly on Heimdal, and provide bogus error 
  messages. This will not be fixed, because the maintainer has no Kerberos 5 
  server to test against. Use GSSAPI.