Retchmail

retchmail is a small MRA written in C with the primary objective of being fast. It currently supports only the POP3 protocol with SSL support. Unlike fetchmail, retchmail lacks many features and isn't particularly robust, as the authors state. However, its unique features include the ability to retrieve from multiple remote mailboxes simultaneously, the policy of retrieving smaller mail before larger ones and the feature of downloading more than one e-mail message simultaneously. These features are clearly targeted at achieving high mail retrieval speeds. In fact, retchmail claims to be up to five times as fast as many other MRAs in existence.
retchmail is free software licensed under the GNU LGPL. It is written and maintained by Avery Pennarun and Patrick Patterson.
Features of retchmail
* Supports retrieval from POP3 formatted mailboxes
* Supports delivery via a Mail Delivery Agent or via SMTP
* Supports retrieval from multiple mailboxes simultaneously
* SSL Support
* Licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence
Communicating directly with the mail delivery agent
By default, the retchmail mail retrieval agent passes mail messages to the mail transport agent listening on the port 25. It is possible for retchmail to communicate directly with the mail delivery agent by placing the full pathname of the mail delivery agent into the ~/.retchmail/retchmail.conf configuration file as follows:
username@pop3.server.net = /usr/bin/procmail
Note that retchmail passes the username of the intended recipient as a command line parameter to the mail retrieval agent.
Multiple Mailbox Support
The retchmail mail retrieval agent supports retrieval of mail from multiple mailboxes simultaneously. This enables a mailserver to run just a single invocation from the cron to collects all users mail, rather than having the cron run individual tasks against each mail recipients user account.

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