[sclug] Mail system explanation wanted please

[Simon Huggins]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 07:23:35PM +0100, Neil Haughton wrote:
> I generally use Thunderbird for my email, connected direct to my ISP
> POP and SMTP servers. Classic domestic arrangement, you might say.

> Trouble is that I like to ring the changes with different MUA's (keeps
> me young at heart, you see), but at the same time I don't like losing
> all my email each time I try something new. The ideal would be if I
> could keep all my mail (and address book) in some local folders (on my
> machine) in a format that a variety of MUA's would understand.

> I get the feeling that I need procmail or postfix or something else
> set up on my machine, but I can't figure out (probably because I've
> had years of Windows being drummed into my head and the Linux way is
> all very strange to me)  how to point say Thunderbird, KMail or
> Evolution at the local folders, and how and what to use to collect the
> mail from my ISP.

I /think/ you want a local IMAP server then.

Get something to grab the mail from your ISP to your machine and put it
in your IMAP server's mailstore (which will probably be a pile of
Maildir folders) and then point all of your mail clients at the local
IMAP server.  IMAP servers you might like to consider include dovecot,
courier-imap.  I wouldn't touch uw-imapd with a bargepole.  I don't know
much about cyrus.

I hate fetchmail - it's burnt me one too many times.  I used to use
getmail and apparently this supports IMAP.

But you should probably talk to someone who er, uses IMAP regularly :)

I'm sure someone'll pipe up if I got stuff wrong.

Simon.

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