[NBLUG/talk] Remote mail access

Lincoln Peters sampln at sbcglobal.net
Sun Feb 12 20:08:14 PST 2006


On Sunday 12 February 2006 12:20, Lincoln Peters wrote:
> On Saturday 11 February 2006 23:48, Chris Palmer wrote:
> > Dovecot is a friendly IMAP(S) and POP3(S) server.
>
> Thanks, I'll try that.

It seems to work.  However, I discovered that fetchmail doesn't know how to 
save messages to a maildir (it only supports mbox), and I have way too much 
e-mail that I want to store here to safely use an mbox!

Since I usually run KMail 24/7, I thought I could set up a filter rule to move 
or copy all new mail from the SBC account into the IMAP server's inbox.  This 
turned into a small disaster; apparently there is some bug that causes KMail 
to crash if a filter tries to move or copy a message to an IMAP folder (I've 
submitted a bug report to the KMail developers).

Then, about an hour ago I thought: might there be a program comparable to 
fetchmail that supports maildir?  So I searched the apt repository and ran 
across a program called getmail.  And it seems to work!


So what I finally have is exim as the mail server, dovecot as the IMAP(S) 
server, and getmail fetching e-mail from SBC to the ~/Maildir folder that is 
being used by dovecot.  I can use IMAP(S) to check my e-mail with any 
application that supports that protocol, and I can have two programs access 
it at the same time without any conflicts.  And, yes, I'm using ddclient to 
keep my DynDNS hostname in sync with my actual IP address, and I have my 
router set up with port forwarding for IMAPS (but not unsecured IMAP).

If anyone is interested in detailed instructions for how I set this up, I can 
post them later.

-- 
Lincoln Peters
<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

World Domination, of course.  And scantily clad females.  Who cares if
its twenty below?        -- Linus Torvalds

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