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Some sites use a method called POP for accessing users’ inbox data
instead of storing the data in inbox files. By default, the Emacs
movemail can work with POP (unless the Emacs configure script
was run with the option ‘--without-pop’).
Similarly, the Mailutils movemail by default supports POP, unless
it was configured with the ‘--disable-pop’ option.
Both versions of movemail only work with POP3, not with older
versions of POP.
No matter which flavor of movemail you use, you can specify
a POP inbox by using a POP URL (see Movemail). A POP
URL is of the form
‘pop://username@hostname’, where
hostname is the host name or IP address of the remote mail
server and username is the user name on that server.
Additionally, you may specify the password in the mailbox URL:
‘pop://username:password@hostname’. In this
case, password takes preference over the one set by
rmail-remote-password (see below). This is especially useful
if you have several remote mailboxes with different passwords.
For backward compatibility, Rmail also supports an alternative way of
specifying remote POP mailboxes. Specifying an inbox name in the form
‘po:username:hostname’ is equivalent to
‘pop://username@hostname’. If you omit the
:hostname part, the MAILHOST environment variable specifies
the machine on which to look for the POP server.
Another method for accessing remote mailboxes is IMAP. This method is
supported only by the Mailutils movemail. To specify an IMAP
mailbox in the inbox list, use the following mailbox URL:
‘imap://username[:password]@hostname’. The
password part is optional, as described above.
Accessing a remote mailbox may require a password. Rmail uses the following algorithm to retrieve it:
rmail-remote-password-required is nil,
Rmail assumes no password is required.
rmail-remote-password is non-nil, its
value is used.
If you need to pass additional command-line flags to movemail,
set the variable rmail-movemail-flags a list of the flags you
wish to use. Do not use this variable to pass the ‘-p’ flag to
preserve your inbox contents; use rmail-preserve-inbox instead.
The movemail program installed at your site may support
Kerberos authentication (the Emacs movemail does so if Emacs was
configured with the option --with-kerberos or
--with-kerberos5). If it is supported, it is used by default
whenever you attempt to retrieve POP mail when
rmail-remote-password and rmail-remote-password-required
are unset.
Some POP servers store messages in reverse order. If your server does
this, and you would rather read your mail in the order in which it was
received, you can tell movemail to reverse the order of
downloaded messages by adding the ‘-r’ flag to
rmail-movemail-flags.
Mailutils movemail supports TLS encryption. If you wish to
use it, add the ‘--tls’ flag to rmail-movemail-flags.
Next: Other Mailbox Formats, Previous: Movemail, Up: Rmail [Contents][Index]