Fetchmail - the mail-retrieval daemon Files

This code is obsolete and no longer maintained.
Please go to the .../branch_6.4 directory and download the latest
6.4.x release (or release candidate)!

-- Matthias Andree, 2019-08-24

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Fetchmail Release Notes
=======================

This file is in Unicode charset with UTF-8 encoding.
All dates are in Universal Time unless otherwise noted.

(The `lines' figures total .c, .h, .l, and .y files under version control.
Abbreviations in parentheses are the maintainers who committed the respective
change.  MA = Matthias Andree, ESR = Eric S. Raymond, RF = Rob Funk.)

# ADVANCE WARNING OF FEATURES TO BE REMOVED OR CHANGED IN FUTURE VERSIONS
(There are no plans to remove features from a 6.3.X release, but they may be
removed from a 6.4.0 or newer release.)
* The MX and host alias DNS lookups that fetchmail performs in multidrop mode
  are based on assumptions that are rarely met in practice, somewhat defective,
  deprecated and may be removed from a future fetchmail version.
  They have never supported IPv6 (including IPv6-mapped IPv4).
  Non-DNS based alias keywords such as "aka" will remain in fetchmail.
* The monitor and interface options may be removed from a future fetchmail
  version as they are not reasonably portable across operating systems.
* POP2 is obsolete, support will be removed from a future fetchmail version.
* IMAP2 and IMAP4 (not IMAP4r1) are obsolete, support may be removed from a
  future fetchmail version.
* RPOP is obsolete, support will be removed from a future fetchmail release.
* --sslcertck will become a default setting in a future fetchmail version.
* The multidrop To/Cc guessing code along with the fragile duplicate suppressor
  is deprecated and may be removed from a future release.
* The "envelope Received" option may be removed from a future release, because
  the Received header was never meant to be machine-readable, the format varies
  widely, and various other differences in behavior make parsing Received an
  unreliable undertaking. The envelope option as such will remain though, in
  order to support Delivered-To, X-Envelope-To, X-Original-To and similar.
  See also <http://home.pages.de/~mandree/mail/multidrop>.
* The --enable-fallback (fall back to MDA if MTA unavailable) will be removed
  from a future fetchmail release, because it makes fetchmail's behavior
  inconsistent and confusing.
* The "protocol auto" default inside fetchmail may be removed from a future
  fetchmail release. Explicit configuration of the protocol is recommended.
* Kerberos IV support may be removed from a future fetchmail release.
* Kerberos 5 support may be removed from a future fetchmail release.
* The --principal option may be removed from a future fetchmail release.
* SIGHUP wakeup support may be removed from a future fetchmail release and
  cause fetchmail to terminate - it was broken for many years.
* Support for operating systems that are not sufficiently POSIX compliant may be
  removed or operation on such systems may be suboptimal for future releases.
  This means that fetchmail may only continue to work on C99 and POSIX 2001
  based systems.
* The maintainer may migrate fetchmail to C++ with STL or C#, and impose further
  requirements (dependencies), such as Boost or other class libraries.
* The softbounce option default will change to "false" in the next release.
* The --bsmtp - mode of operation may be removed in a future release.
* Given that OpenSSL is severely underdocumented, and needs license exceptions,
  fetchmail may switch to a different SSL library.
* SSLv2 support will be removed from a future fetchmail release. It has been
  obsolete for more than a decade.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

fetchmail-6.3.26 (released 2013-04-23, 26180 LoC):

# NOTE THAT FETCHMAIL IS NO LONGER PUBLISHED THROUGH IBIBLIO.
* They have stopped accepting submissions and consider themselves an archive.

# CRITICAL BUG FIX for setups using "mimedecode":
* The mimedecode feature failed to ship the last line of the body if it was
  encoded as quoted-printable and had a MIME soft line break in the very last
  line.  Reported by Lars Hecking in June 2011.

  Bug introduced on 1998-03-20 when the mimedecode support was added by ESR
  before release 4.4.1 through code contributed by Henrik Storner.
  Workaround for older releases: do not use mimedecode feature.

  Earlier versions of this NEWS file claimed this bug fixed in fetchmail-6.3.23,
  but it was not.

  Fixes Launchpad Bug#1171818.

# 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)
* 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.