[Gllug] Evolution won't fetch my mail (Help)

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Fri, 2002-08-09 at 06:03, Jim Bailey wrote:

> I agree with you on the courier docs FWIW, I gave up early on trying to
> find stuff on their web interface, it is like the Scarlet Pimpernel.
> 
> The courier people are building there own mail system including an MTA
> which I don't use and also a filtering system/delivery agent called
> maildrop which apparently has easier syntax than procmail and of course
> the IMAP pop3 MDA.  I have had procmail running happily with Courier
> IMAP but a while back changed to Maildrop just because I could.  This
> week I am mainly running Maildrop and Procmail together because I am a
> muppet. 

The Courier author, IMHO, has his own opinion of what the perfect mail
system is, and is hell-bent on implementing it. Any time the standards
disagree, the standards go out of the window. Have a look at the article
at http://makeashorterlink.com/?A19A21B71 for a nice view of the
author's regard for specifications..... It's worth reading the whole
thread, if you can take the flamefest.

> At some point in the future I intend to go purely procmail to
> take advantage of Spam Assassin and Razor.

You can run spam assassin as a daemon, and on a heavily hot mail serber,
this is probably better than using procmail to invoke it on every
message.

> Long term I want to play with SASL, TLS, LDAP and/or Postgres user
> authentification and management, Virtual Maildir and Maildir++ virtual
> user quotas and mail server clustering, oh and I want it to whistle
> Dixie everytime I log on.

You really should take a look at Cyrus, it'll deal with SASL, TLS, and
LDAP effortlessly, and you get real quota support thrown in. As each
IMAP login is fielded by a master process, which has an inetd like
configuration file, I suspect it would be easier to hack in "whistle
dixie" support than most other mail servers. However, you'd want some
kind of networked audio, otherwise the server room would reverberate to
much whistling. Also, you'd want to avoid IMAP clients than open
parallel IMAP sessions, as that could become complicated....

Oh, and there's Cyrus murder for mail server clustering. It's also
trivial to separate the MTA from the store on a Cyrus system, as you can
just have your MTA do LMTP delivery over the network.
 
> Indeed, I have just realised I am turning into a mail server junkie, in
> recent week I have gained comfort in watching the mail logs scroll by in
> a xterm, I need therapy or a girlfriend. ;)

Yep, you're losing it :-)
 
> On a slightly more serious note the reason I chose the combinations I
> have is that they all modular and start out fairly simple to configure
> initially a very important consideration for someone of my skill level
> and experience.  Once have mastered one part I turn on another set of
> features and learn those.  If I had started with Cyrus, Sendmail and the
> such I would of made a terrible mess had my toys take off me and given
> to one of the bigger boys to play with.

Cyrus is a pain to get running, but worth it. Sendmail, while my MTA of
choice, presents lots of pro's and con's. The libmilter interface is
well worth having, and the spamassassin-milter stuff is on my list to
look at. If you're more familiar with another MTA, you're probably
better sticking with it. I would say that if you intend to try Cyrus,
you should consider built in LMTP support a requirement - I don't like
the cyrus "deliver" wrapper at all, and have had trouble with it in the
past.

Mike.


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