Fetchmail is a utility for fetching mail from a variety of servers, including POP2, POP3, and IMAP, and passing it to a local SMTP daemon for local delivery. This means, among other things, that all the sorting, filtering, and processing that you can set up with sendmail can be used with POP or IMAP servers. Or, in the simplest case, you can just use it to retrieve your mail. Fetchmail was written by Eric S. Raymond.
The author's homepage for Fetchmail has much more information, some of which is also included in this distribution. The Fetchmail FAQ is here, as is a list of features.
I use Gnus for email. I used to use VM and I sometimes use Elm. All of these programs do email in the traditional way, which is to read it from a local file, to which mail is delivered by some other program. This is in contrast to most OS/2 mail programs, which have built-in POP retrieval functions. These have a serious downside, which is that you can't switch mail retrieval methods without switching mail readers, and it's hard to migrate mail from one mailer to another.
Emacs for OS/2 includes a POP retrieval program called poppoll, which fetches mail from a POP3 server and deposits it in a local file that Emacs can then access with movemail. Poppoll works okay, but it has some drawbacks. The biggest drawback for me was that poppoll uses a PM popup program to read and cache the user's password on the POP server. This means that it doesn't work under XFree86, among other things.
So I switched from poppoll to popclient, a POP fetching program ported from Unix. It works fine, but I heard that popclient had been upgraded and tranformed into something completely different, called fetchmail. One of fetchmail's big advantages is that it unifies the normal SMTP mail delivery path with retreiving mail from POP. With OS/2 now including a more or less complete BSD-oid TCP/IP, it seemed worth it to try to switch to SMTP mail using fetchmail to go between it and POP.
First, you have to get local mail delivery working. For that, you need a mail delivery agent (MDA). In their wisdom, IBM have chosen not to include one in Warp 4; I don't know about Warp Connect. I've included deliver, the MDA included with EM's Emacs port. Follow the instructions in deliver/deliver.doc, and try sending some mail to yourself at localhost.
Then, you need to make a working .fetchmailrc for your setup. It goes in %HOME%. There's a sample in sample.rcfile; the file format is described in fetchmail.doc (generated from the manual page). When you think you have it working, type fetchmail --version to see what it will do. Be sure to read the bugs section below.
This is a very basic, straightforward port from the Unix sources. So that means nothing in particular has been done to adapt this to use on OS/2. You need to have %HOME% and %ETC% set, %HOME% needs to be on an HPFS, EXT2FS, NTFS, etc, drive so that the filename .fetchmailrc is legal, etc. Eventually I suppose I'll have to fix it to also look for fetchmailrc (no dot) in %HOME% and %ETC%.
I have tested this port on a POP3 server only, so if anyone's using IMAP, I'd be happy to hear from you. I also haven't tested any advanced features including multidrop boxes. I may have broken things I don't know about. I'm using it for all of my mail now, but my needs are not great. The original fetchmail is very stable, safe, and reliable; this port may or may not be.
The interface features (like activity monitoring) are Linux specific, and I haven't made any particular efforts to try to port them. If anyone can get them working, I'd love to hear about it. The monitor feature would work great with In-Joy's dial-on-demand mode if anyone can figure out how to implement them on OS/2.
Please, do not refer to this piece of software as fetchmail/2! It is an unfortunate habit of the OS/2 community to refer to ports of existing pieces of software by appending a "/2". In the case of the OS/2 port of Lynx 2-7-1, this caused a great deal of confusion, because there was already a Lynx/2 by someone else, based on a much older (and non-GPL) codebase. As far as I know, there's no pre-existing fetchmail/2, but I'm irked enough for this to be a pet peeve of mine. So don't do it! This is "fetchmail 4.3.7, OS/2 release 1", or loosely, "fetchmail for OS/2" or "OS/2 fetchmail".
Two known:
I think I have fixed the problem the beta version of OS/2 Fetchmail had with server timeout. I have used a second thread to emulate itimers; interested parties can refer to patches.os2 for more information.
This program is distributed under the GNU Public License. Be sure to read the file COPYING, which details your rights and responsibilities under this license. This software has NO WARRANTY: please read sections 11 and 12 of the GPL for full information. You use this software at your own risk: you could well use mail, so test before you use it. Neither I, nor the original author, nor any contributors will be responsible for any damages caused by the use of this software even if your computer turns into a toadstool and monkeys fly out of your bodily orifices.
For comments, especially bug-reports or enhancements, specific to this port, write to Jason F. McBrayer. For more general questions about fetchmail, please read the fetchmail FAQ and follow the contact information there.