Retrieving Emails From Remote Servers With fetchmail

Fetchmail is a program for retrieving emails from remote servers. Imagine you have five email accounts on five different servers. Of course, you don't want to connect to each of them to get your emails. This is where fetchmail comes into play. If you have a user account on a Linux server, you can make fetchmail download emails from remote servers and put them into just one mailbox (the one of your Linux user), from where you can retrieve them with your email client (e.g. Thunderbird or Outlook).

Or imagine you have an email account at a provider that doesn't do spam- and virus filtering. In that case you could use fetchmail to download the mails to your own server and pipe them through spam- and virus filters (e.g. SpamAssassin and ClamAV) before you download the mails with your email client.

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