popclient was written by Carl Harris, Jr. See his copyright message.

The Unficial popclient Page

Introduction

popclient is a Unix tool for grabbing mail from other hosts via the Post Office Protocol. It takes the mail from the remote host and tosses it in your local inbox, where you can read it just like any other mail. You can use popclient multiple times to consolidate new mail on multiple hosts into one inbox.

For instance, if you have popclient installed in a subdirectory called "bin" and an account on the machine "freenet.nether.net" called "egusr", the following command will retrieve that account's new mail: 

bin/popclient -u egusr freenet.nether.net
popclient will prompt you for your password and then attempt to retrieve your mail. Once it finishes, you can read your new mail with Pine or something.

Installation

Ideally, popclient would be installed in one place and everybody could use it. Until that happens, here's how to get a copy of your own working:
  1. make sure that you have at least 250 blocks of free space in your account. Type quota and do a little math.
  2. create yourself a bin directory by typing mkdir bin. This gives you a handy place to put the program.
  3. download popclient. When Lynx asks you what to do with it, tell it to save it to disk, specifying "~/bin/popclient" as the filename.
  4. do a chmod u+x ~/bin/popclient to make sure it's executable.

Running

popclient works on Blaze and Flames -- don't bother trying to run it on Ivory. Here's a rough look at the necessary syntax. I assume that you have popclient installed in ~/bin 
bin/popclient -2 -u username hostname
Breaking it down, we have:
bin/popclient
the location and name of the program
-2
optional specification of the POP 2 protocol instead of the default POP 3 (but see below if you're compiling from the source for yourself). You shouldn't need to use this option.
-u
the username option, required if your username on the remote host is different from your username on Blaze.
username
replace this with your username on the remote host. Don't include this if you haven't included -u, above.
hostname
replace this with the name of the remote host.

For detailed and thorough documentation, please see the popclient manual page, available in the source distribution.

Where and how to get it

Right here. Highlight the following link in Lynx and then press "d" to download: popclient binary for Blaze or Flames.

You can also download the source distribution, which includes the manual page and the Makefile, all ready to go. You'll need to get this if you're going to use popclient on your own machine. Note that to make your binary of popclient behave the same way as the one I'm providing here, you have to edit config.h and change the default protocol from POP 2 to POP 3.

To read the popclient manual page, unpack the source distribution like this, which creates a subdirectory named "pop" containing all of the relevant stuff: 

gunzip popclient.tar.gz && tar xvf popclient.tar
Then, do this: 
nroff -man pop/popclient.1L | less

This unficial guide to popclient was written by Eric Smith with the help of a bug-squish from Dan Saraga. popclient was written by Carl Harris, Jr. See his copyright message.