getmail For Linux

getmail is an open source, simple, small, free and fast command-line software project implemented in Python and designed to be used for retrieving electronic mail messages from normal, single-user mailboxes, as well as from multidrop (domain) mailboxes. It supports single or multiple email accounts.

The software offers full support for all mainstream mail protocols, including IMAP4 (Internet Message Access Protocol), IMAP4-over-SSL, POP3 (Post Office Protocol 3), POP3-over-SSL, as well as SDPS (Standard Dial-up POP3 Service) mail accounts.

It’s a very reliable program that supports filtering, annotation and classification of messages, supports delivering of emails to multiple destinations (based on the email recipient), it is flexible and extensible, through plugins.

To use the getmail program on your GNU/Linux computer, you should first download the latest release from either the project’s official homepage (see link at the end of the article) or via Softpedia, save the archive somewhere on your Home directory, and unpack it.

Open a Terminal app, navigate to the location where you have extracted the archive file (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/getmail-4.46.0), and run the ‘sudo python setup.py install’ command to install getmail system wide and make it available to all users on your machine.

After installation, run the ‘getmail --help’ command to view the usage message and available command-line options. Basically, the user will be able to load a custom configuration file or use overrides, which allow him/her to override the options specified in the configuration file.

getmail is a true cross-platform application that supports GNU/Linux, GNU HURD, BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD), HP/UX, Solaris, IBM AIX, Digital/Compaq Tru64 (a.k.a OSF/1) UNIX, SGI Irix, Digital VMS, OpenVMS, BeOS, Amiga OS, OS/2, Cygwin on Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. It currently supports 32 and 64-bit hardware platforms.