* Roger Price <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, 17 Aug 2026, Michel Verdier wrote:
What is your version ? Here I have fetchmail 6.4.39-1
rprice@titan ~ apt show fetchmail
Package: fetchmail
Version: 6.4.39-1
And man fetchmail or fetchmailrc shows :
GENERAL OPERATION
Command-line options override ~/.fetchmailrc declarations.
When I started to write the message, I had not yet understood that
« Command-line options override ~/.fetchmailrc declarations » means that Debian
13 replaces ~/.fetchmailrc with /etc/fetchmailrc .
Debian 13 doesn't replace ~/.fetchmailrc with /etc/fetchmailrc. Debian
uses both files as described in /usr/share/doc/fetchmail/README.Debian.gz for
ages
It has also a paragraph called "Running the system-wide fetchmail as
root", which is not recommended since fetchmail 5,8, changelog from year 2001!
* Running fetchmail as root is dangerous. The safest way is to run it as a
very unpriviledged user (you could even chroot it, I suppose) and
deliver over smtp. Stress this on the documentation
