getmail

getmail is an open source, simple, small, free and fast command-line software project implemented in Python and designed to be used for retrieving electronic mail messages from normal, single-user mailboxes, as well as from multidrop (domain) mailboxes. It supports single or multiple email accounts.

Offers full support for all mainstream mail protocols

The software offers full support for all mainstream mail protocols, including IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol), IMAP4-over-SSL, POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), POP3-over-SSL, as well as SDPS (Standard Dial-up POP3 Service) mail accounts.

It’s a very reliable program that supports filtering, annotation and classification of messages, supports delivering of emails to multiple destinations (based on the email recipient), it is flexible and extensible, through plugins.

Getting started with getmail

To use the getmail program on your GNU/Linux computer, you should first download the latest release from either the project’s official homepage (see link at the end of the article) or via Softoware, save the archive somewhere on your Home directory, and unpack it.

Open a Terminal app, navigate to the location where you have extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softoware/getmail-4.46.0), and run the ‘sudo python setup.py install’ command to install getmail system wide and make it available to all users on your machine.

Command-line options

After installation, run the ‘getmail --help’ command to view the usage message and available command-line options. Basically, the user will be able to load a custom configuration file or use overrides, which allow him/her to override the options specified in the configuration file.

Runs on numerous UNIX-like operating systems

getmail is a true cross-platform application that supports GNU/Linux, GNU HURD, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD), HP/UX, Solaris, IBM AIX, Digital/Compaq Tru64 (a.k.a OSF/1) UNIX, SGI Irix, Digital VMS, OpenVMS, BeOS, Amiga OS, OS/2, Cygwin on Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. It currently supports 32 and 64-bit hardware platforms.

What is new in this release:

• work around brain-damaged change in Python's poplib which causes message retrieval errors if any line of a message has more than 2048 characters in it.
• restore link to moved Marc mailing list archive. Thanks: David J. Weller-Fahy.

What is new in version 4.46.0:

• Added IMAP IDLE support.

What is new in version 4.34.0:

• retrieve Gmail metadata (labels, thread ID, message ID) via IMAP extension and record it in new message headers. Thanks: Krzysztof Warzecha.

What is new in version 4.27.0:

• make use of IMAP BODY.PEEK configurable; set the IMAP retriever parameter `use_peek` to False to disable use of PEEK to get getmail's historical IMAP behaviour.

What is new in version 4.26.0:

• switch to using BODY.PEEK in IMAP retrieval; I no longer see problems with this feature in my testing. If users experience incompatibility with any IMAP servers where 4.25.0 worked, please let me know.

What is new in version 4.25.0:

• Add support for storing POP/IMAP password in OSX keychain. Thanks: Adam Lazur.

What is new in version 4.24.0:

• add an explicit expunge when closing an IMAP mailbox, for servers that incorrectly do not do this when the mailbox is closed. Thanks: Nicolas PomarA¨de.
• fix incorrect section reference for `mailboxes` parameter in documentation. Thanks: Ross Boylan.
• fix getmail_fetch broken in 4.21.0. Thanks: Chris Donoghue.

What is new in version 4.23.0:

• This version fixes a race that occurred if a new message showed up in a POP3 mailbox between running the UIDL and LIST commands.

What is new in version 4.20.3:

• Fixed logging errors in error paths.

What is new in version 4.20.2:

• Further changes to the Received: header construction to handle IPv6 better.

Requirements:

• Python