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Rmail uses the movemail program to move mail from your inbox to your Rmail file (see Rmail Inbox). When loaded for the first time, Rmail attempts to locate the movemail program and determine its version. There are two versions of the movemail program: the GNU Mailutils version (see movemail), and an Emacs-specific version that is built and installed unless Emacs was configured --with-mailutils in effect. The two movemail versions support the same command line syntax and the same basic subset of options. However, the Mailutils version offers additional features and is more secure.
The Emacs version of movemail can retrieve mail from the usual Unix mailbox formats. Warning: Although it can also use the POP3 protocol, this is not recommended because it does not support POP3 via encrypted TLS channels.
The Mailutils version is able to handle a wide set of mailbox
formats, such as plain Unix mailboxes, maildir
and MH
mailboxes, etc. It is able to access remote mailboxes using the POP3
or IMAP4 protocol, and can retrieve mail from them using a TLS
encrypted channel. It also accepts mailbox arguments in URL
form. The detailed description of mailbox URLs can be found
in URL. In short, a
URL is:
proto://[user[:password]@]host-or-file-name[:port]
where square brackets denote optional elements.
proto can be one of:
mbox
mbox:///var/spool/mail/smith
.
mh
mh:///Mail/inbox
.
maildir
maildir
mailbox, e.g.,
maildir:///mail/inbox
.
file
pop
pops
pop://smith:[email protected]:995
.
If the server supports it, movemail tries to use an
encrypted connection—use the ‘pops’ form to require one.
imap
imaps
imap://smith:[email protected]:993
.
If the server supports it, movemail tries to use an
encrypted connection—use the ‘imaps’ form to require one.
Alternatively, you can specify the file name of the mailbox to use. This is equivalent to specifying the ‘file’ protocol:
/var/spool/mail/user == file:///var/spool/mail/user
The variable rmail-movemail-program
controls which version of
movemail to use. If that is a string, it specifies the
absolute file name of the movemail executable. If it is
nil
, Rmail searches for movemail in the directories
listed in rmail-movemail-search-path
, then in exec-path
(see Shell), then in exec-directory
.