[sclug] mail setup: getmail, dovecot - and exim?

[Martin Meredith]

I'd highly suggest that you have seperate mailboxes at the ISPs end for
doing this. It makes life so much easier!

I currently use postfix + fetchmail + courier, and I find that fetchmail
has by far the easiest configuration

I have a few accounts where I have email "forwarded" to - and I use
gmail to collect these. My server then uses fetchmail to pull the email
from the server and deliver it (through postfix) to the correct user.

The fetchmail configuration for my ubuntu account for example, is

set postmaster "ubuntu.sourceguru"
set daemon 30

poll pop.gmail.com with proto POP3
           user 'mez.ubuntu at gmail.com' there with password
'************' is ubuntu.sourceguru here options ssl

Then I just run the command "fetchmail" - which forks itself off as a
background process and starts fetching mail (and also restarts itself
automatically on a reboot)

I don't know about getmail/exim/dovecot  but I'd assume that the process
would be similar - and make life a lot easier for you if you DID have
seperate user accounts remotely for each locally


On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 00:42 +0100, John Stumbles wrote:
> [This is on a Debian stable box]
> 
> I've got things set up so that cron runs getmail which polls my various 
> mailboxes (all pop) bringing me news of guaranteed-win street casinos 
> and suchlike wonders, which it puts into my ~/Maildir. Dovecot then 
> dishes this up to whatever imap-speaking mail client currently seems 
> least broken (currently thund^H^H^H^Hicedove).
> 
> getmail actually gets all mail for my domains, including some for other 
> members of my family which I'd like to have delivered to them (and 
> likewise have served by dovecot). I might be able to configure my mail 
> severs so that mail for specific email addresses is not retrieved by my 
> own getmail, and have other users have cron jobs to run getmail to get 
> their mail ... but this seems clunky.
> 
> I think I should be using procmail or suchlike to filter mail for others 
> and pass it to them - but how? If procmail is running as me it won't 
> have access to their Maildirs (unless one can somehow horribly kludge 
> file permissions). This distro has exim installed so I guess my procmail 
> should ask exim to deliver users' mail to them. (Just a matter of wading 
> through the Friendly Manuals to find out how to do this :-()
> 
> I guess that exim will deliver to users' /var/spool/mail/<username> mail 
> spools. That's where system mail for me goes, and I fire up mutt from 
> time to time to check it. I need to either get exim to deliver to 
> Maildirs (if it can do this) or reconfigure dovecot to serve up 
> mailspools as well as Maildirs (if that's possible: I think I saw that 
> working when I was first playing around with it, but I'm damned if I 
> know how to make it work again now that I want it :-()
> 
> Does this sound like the right approach or am I missing something? And 
> if I am on the right track, any pointers to how to configure things?
>