fetchmail-6.4.1

[Bruce Dubbs]

New minor version pending.

The README says:

branch_6.4 - up-to-date stable code, as of 2019.
branch_6.3 - historic code, not to be used any more. use branch_6.4 instead, 
             it is mostly compatible, and see NEWS for required configuration 
             changes - mostly --sslproto.

But the most recent release is only fetchmail-6.4.0.rc2.tar.xz as of August 19.

[Bruce Dubbs]

It's been at least a month since this package was updated. Moving to hold.

[Douglas R. Reno]

On 2019-09-28, fetchmail 6.4.1 has been released (click this link to download, or to see changes since 6.3.26) . Note that you will need OpenSSL 1.0.2 to compile.

[ken@…]

fetchmail-6.4.1 (released 2019-09-28, 27473 LoC):

## REGRESSION FIXES:

• The bug fix Debian Bug#941129 was incomplete and caused + a regression in the default file locations, so that fetchmail was no longer

able to find its configuration files in some situations. Reported by Cy Schubert.

+ a regression under _FORTIFY_SOURCE where PATH_MAX > minimal _POSIX_PATH_MAX.

---

fetchmail 6.4.0 (released 2019-09-27, 27429 LoC):

# NOTE THAT FETCHMAIL IS NO LONGER PUBLISHED THROUGH IBIBLIO.

• They have stopped accepting submissions and consider themselves an archive.

## SECURITY FIXES THAT AFFECT BEHAVIOUR AND MAY REQUIRE RECONFIGURATION

• Fetchmail no longer supports SSLv2.
• Fetchmail no longer attempts to negotiate SSLv3 by default, even with --sslproto ssl23. Fetchmail can now use SSLv3, or TLSv1.1 or a newer TLS version, with STLS/STARTTLS (it would previously force TLSv1.0 with STARTTLS). If the OpenSSL version used at build and run-time supports these versions, --sslproto ssl3 and --sslproto ssl3+ can be used to re-enable SSLv3. Doing so is discouraged because the SSLv3 protocol is broken.

Along the lines suggested - as patch - by Kurt Roeckx, Debian Bug #768843.

While this change is supposed to be compatible with common configurations, users may have to and are advised to change all explicit --sslproto ssl2 (change to newer protocols required), --sslproto ssl3, --sslproto tls1 to --sslproto auto, so that they can benefit from TLSv1.1 and TLSv1.2 where supported by the server.

The --sslproto option now understands the values auto, ssl3+, tls1+, tls1.1, tls1.1+, tls1.2, tls1.2+, tls1.3, tls1.3+ (case insensitively), see CHANGES below for details.

• Fetchmail defaults to --sslcertck behaviour. A new option --nosslcertck to override this has been added, but may be removed in future fetchmail versions in favour of another configuration option that makes the insecurity in using this option clearer.

## SECURITY FIXES

• Fetchmail prevents buffer overruns in GSSAPI authentication with user names beyond c. 6000 characters in length. Reported by Greg Hudson.

## CHANGED REQUIREMENTS

• fetchmail 6.4.0 is written in C99 and requires a SUSv3 (Single Unix Specification v3, a superset of POSIX.1-2001 aka. IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 with XSI extension) compliant system. For now, a C89 compiler should also work if the system is SUSv3 compliant.

In particular, older fetchmail versions had workaround for several functions standardized in the Single Unix Specification v3, these have been removed.

The trio/ library has been removed from the distribution.

## CHANGES

• fetchmail 6.3.X is unsupported.
• fetchmail now configures OpenSSL support by default.
• fetchmail now requires OpenSSL v1.0.2 or newer.
• Fetchmail now supports --sslproto auto and --sslproto tls1+ (same as ssl23).
• --sslproto tls1.1+, tls1.2+, and tls1.3+ are now supported for auto-negotiation with a minimum specified TLS protocol version, and --sslproto tls1.1, --sslproto tls1.2 and --sslproto tls1.3 to force the specified TLS protocol version. Note that tls1.3 requires OpenSSL v1.1.1 or newer.
• Fetchmail now detects if the server hangs up prematurely during SSL_connect() and reports this condition as such, and not just as SSL connection failure. (OpenSSL 1.0.2 reported incompatible with pop3.live.com by Jerry Seibert).
• A foreground fetchmail can now accept a few more options while another copy is running in the background.
• fetchmail now handles POP3 --keep UID lists more efficiently, by using Rainer Weikusat's P-Tree implementation. This reduces the complexity for handling a large UIDL from O(n^{2) to O(n log n) and becomes noticably faster with thousands of kept messages. (IMAP does not currently track UIDs and is unaffected.) At the same time, the UIDL emulation code for deficient servers has been removed. It never worked really well. Servers that do not implement the optional UIDL command only work with --fetchall option set, which in itself is incompatible with the --keep option (it would cause message duplication).}
• fetchmail, when setting up TLS connections, now uses SSL_set_tlsext_host_name() to set up the SNI (Server Name Indication). Some servers (for instance googlemail) require SNI when using newer SSL protocols.
• Fetchmail now sets the expected hostname through OpenSSL 1.0.2's new X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_host() function to enable OpenSSL's native certificate verification features.
• fetchmail will drop the connection when fetching with IMAP and receiving an unexpected untagged "* BYE" response, to work around certain faulty servers.
• The FETCHMAIL_POP3_FORCE_RETR environment variable is now documented, it forces fetchmail, when talking POP3, to always use the RETR command, even if it would otherwise use the TOP command.
• Fetchmail's configure stage will try to query pkg-config or pkgconf for libssl and libcrypto, in case other system use .pc files to document specific library dependencies. (contributed by Fabrice Fontaine, GitLab merge request !14.)
• The gethostbyname() API calls and compatibility functions have been removed.
• These translations are shipped but not installed by default because they have less than 500 translated messages out of 714: el fi gl pt_BR sk tr -> Greek, Finnish, Galician, Brazilian Portuguese, Slovak, Turkish.
• Fetchmail now refuses delivery if the MDA option contains single-quoted expansions.

## FIXES

• Fix a typo in the FAQ. Submitted by David Lawyer, Debian Bug#706776.
• Do not translate header tags such as "Subject:". Reported by Gonzalo Pérez de Olaguer Córdoba, Debian Bug#744907.
• Convert most links from berlios.de to sourceforge.net.
• Report error to stderr, and exit, if --idle is combined with multiple accounts.
• Point to --idle from GENERAL OPERATION to clarify --idle and multiple mailboxes do not mix. In response to Jeremy Chadwick's trouble 2014-11-19, fetchmail-users mailing list.
• Fix SSL-enabled build on systems that do not declare SSLv3_client_method(), or that #define OPENSSL_NO_SSL3 inside #include <openssl/ssl.h> Related to Debian Bug#775255. Fixes Debian Bug #804604.
• Version report lists -SSLv3 on SSL-enabled no-ssl3 builds.
• Fetchmail no longer adds a NUL byte to the username in GSSAPI authentication. This was reported to break Kerberos-based authentication with Microsoft Exchange 2013 by Greg Hudson.
• Set umask properly before writing the .fetchids file, to avoid failing the security check on the next run. Reported by Fabian Raab, Fixes Debian Bug#831611.
• When forwarding by LMTP, also check antispam response code when collecting the responses after the CR LF . CR LF sequence at the end of the DATA phase. (Contributed by Evil.2000, GitLab merge request !12.)
• fetchmail will not try other protocols after a socket error. This avoids mismatches of how different prococols see messages as "seen" and re-fetches of known mail. (Fix contributed by Lauri Nurmi, GitLab Merge Request !10.)
• fetchmail no longer reports "System error during SSL_connect(): Success." Fixes Debian Bug#928916, reported by Paul Kimoto.
• fetchmailconf would ignore Edit or Delete actions on the first (topmost) item in a list (no matter if server list, user list, ...).
• The mimedecode feature now properly detects multipart/mixed-type matches, so that quoted-printable-encoded multipart messages can get decoded. (Regression in 5.0.0 on 1999-03-27, as a side effect of a PGP-mimedecode fix attributed to Henrik Storner.)
• FETCHMAILHOME can now safely be a relative path, which will be qualified through realpath(). Previously, it had to be absolute in daemon mode. Reported by Alex Andreotti, Debian Bug#941129.

## UPDATED TRANSLATIONS - THANKS TO:

• CS: Petr Pisar <petr.pisar@…> [Czech]
• EO: Felipe Castro <fefcas@…> [Esperanto]
• FR: Frédéric Marchal <fmarchal@…> [French]
• JP: Takeshi Hamasaki <hmatrjp@…> [Japanese]
• PL: Jakub Bogusz <qboosh@…> [Polish]
• SV: Göran Uddeborg <goeran@…> [Swedish]

# 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.
• 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.

[ken@…]

We currently list an optional dependency of Python-2.7.16, built after Tk-8.6.9. That is obviously for fetchmailconf.py, but the heading now states:

 # WARNING: this needs to be updated for fetchmail 6.4's SSL options,
# and other recent new options;
# WARNING: to be compatible with Python 3, needs to be run thru 2to3.py.

which I take to mean that it won't work properly re SSL. Please note that I have no use for this GUI configurator script. There are also two python2 scripts in contrib/ - should we just drop the dep to python2 ?

[Bruce Dubbs]

Replying to ken@…:

There are also two python2 scripts in contrib/ - should we just drop the dep to python2 ?

Yes. PY2 should go away as soon as we can do it.

[ken@…]

I've been intermittently looking at this, but my test accounts are not particularly useful for this. Will try modifying my current system to use fcron as my normal user. And then look at adding the user log to logrotate. If it works for me, will then confirm with 6.4.1. I'm a bit worried about the size of user log file (at the moment root runs fetchmail as a daemon from my initscript, for a user that will not work for me because I need to stop it to perform certain housekeeping on my maildirs at start of month.

tl;dr - in progress, but probably won't be done until early in November.

[ken@…]

Replying to ken@…:

tl;dr - in progress, but probably won't be done until early in November.

I was too despondent : I will need to check my local scripts a couple of times next week, but the changes for 6.4.1 that I intend to put in the book are not affected by that. However, watching how it runs when invoked as a user has pointed to some changes for the book's fetchmailrc. Will do it shortly.

[ken@…]

r22298.