I wanted a way to create some automated scripts which included downloading and processing mail from a pop3 mailbox. I wrote getmail to fill this need.

Getmail can be used to automatically extract MIME encoded or UU encoded binary files as it downloads your mail, and is the perfect companion to BLAT, which sends mail from the command line.

The most recent version compiled is version 1.33. It was released on April 4, 2002.

Registration
Getmail is free for non-commercial use. If you use it in a business environment, then a fee of $50 USD is payable to Tim Charron. This payment can be made online (via a secure server) here.

Revision History

• 1.33 Fixed inability to parse some mail messages properly
• 1.32 Added "-headersonly" option to download only headers
• 1.31 Added "-domainstamp" option to attach sender's domain to each extracted file
• 1.30 Fixed extraction bug when an extraneous "Status" header appeared after Content- lines, but before message body
• 1.29 Fixed minor bug with "-plain" extraction (occassional extra characters added to output)
• 1.28 Return code is now zero on successs, non-zero on error (used to be the number of messages retrieved).
• 1.27 Unique filename generation changed to ensure that file extension does change.
• 1.26 Added "-ti" timeout option
• 1.25 Getmail now generates non-conflicting attachment names for all extracted attachments
• 1.24 Some attachments (from bulk mailers) were previously ignored. Fixed
• 1.23
  • Added character filter to filename creation routine. Disallowed characters are now converted to an underscore ("_")
  • Addded "-nomsg" command line option, which deletes MSG*.TXT files after download
• 1.22
  • Getmail now converts quoted-printable text to un-mangled text (see ver 1.19 note)
  • Fixed bug in unique filename generation that affected quoted-printable attachments
• 1.21 Enhanced how getmail deals with messages that have embedded multipart messages (Outlook Express does this)
• 1.20 Added "-dir" command to direct file output to an alternate directory
• 1.19 When "-plain" is specified, quoted-printable are also extracted (Note: any QP encoding is actually left intact! -- NEED TO FIX)
• 1.18
  • "-b" and "-m" were broken
  • added "-plain" to allow extraction of text/plain unencoded attachments
• 1.17
  • GWINSOCK.DLL is no longer required
  • When download a mailbox that has multiple files with unnamed attachements, the generated filenames are generated as unique filenames.
  • Added "-b " option to allow retrieving messages starting with # n
• 1.16 Added "-forceextract" option to attempt binary file extract from a previously downloaded message
• 1.15
  • Boundary detection was broken if mailer didn't double quote the boundary
  • Increased tolerance of long lines to 8192 characters (from 4096)
• 1.14 Fixed extraction of UU files where a filename isn't specified in the message
• 1.13 Multi-line Content- header problem fixed
• 1.12 Major speed improvement for extraction of large files
• 1.11
  • Return codes fixed
  • Tightened up parsing of raw UU files
• 1.10
  • Added scanning for multi-line "Content-" headers which use tabs
  • Added ability to deal with files which don't give themselves a filename
• 1.09 Added scanning for multi-line "Content-" headers
• 1.08 Minor change to parsing of MIME headers
• 1.07
  • Extraction flag was being read as "No" from registry regardless of the actual setting. Command line was unaffected.
  • Return code is # of messages downloaded.
  • The message boundary was being mis-read with some mailers.
• 1.06 Added support for 7bit encoded files
• 1.05 Fixed "-profile" which was setting the quiet flag
• 1.04 Added "-n" and "-m" options to allow getting partial contents of a mailbox
• 1.03 UUencoded files -- Raw files now extracted, not just MIME encoded UUE files.
• 1.02 Added UU encoded file support
• 1.01 Added support for extraction of base64 encoded files
• 1.00 Initial release