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Some sites use a method called POP3 for accessing users' inbox data instead of storing the data in inbox files. The Mailutils movemail by default supports POP3 with TLS encryption. Warning: Although the Emacs movemail supports POP3, its use for this is not recommended since it does not support encrypted connections—the Mailutils version does. Both versions of movemail work only with POP3, not with older versions of POP.
You can specify
a POP3 inbox by using a POP3 URL (see Movemail). A POP3
URL is of the form
‘pop://username@hostname:port’, where
hostname and port are the host name (or IP address)
and port number 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:port’. 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.
If using Mailutils movemail, you may wish to use
‘pops’ in place of ‘pop’.
For backward compatibility, Rmail also supports an alternative way of specifying remote POP3 mailboxes. Specifying an inbox name in the form ‘po:username:hostname:port’ is equivalent to ‘pop://username@hostname:port’. If you omit the :hostname part, the MAILHOST environment variable specifies the machine on which to look for the POP3 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:port’. The password part is optional, as described above. You may wish to use ‘imaps’ in place of ‘imap’.
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. If it is supported, it is used by default
whenever you attempt to retrieve POP3 mail when
rmail-remote-password
and rmail-remote-password-required
are unset.
Some POP3 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
.