[SWLUG] mail system setup

[Robert McQueen]

On Sat, Oct 26, 2002 at 06:07:03AM +0100, bascule wrote:
> i'd like some comment on my plans for mail, i wish to set up one of my boxes 
> to collect all my mail and then serve it to other boxes via imap so that i 
> can manage mail sensibly from any box with any of the os' on that box, plus 
> setup a webmail interface to access my mail from 'outside'.

IMAP is very nice, I use it for reading my uni mail from whichever
computer I end up on, and they have a cool webmail system too (which,
like many things, Cambridge pride themselves at being the first at -- 
a uni-wide e-mail system in this case =).

> my first thought was fetchmail plus some imap server, is this the right logic?
> fetchmail grabs my mail, dumps it to a directory, then an imap server serves 
> it?

Fair enough, except...

> does fetchmail have to pass the mail on to something like postfix for delivery 
> into local mailboxes/directories? or will it leave the mail somewhere useful 
> on it's own?

You need to deliver to an MTA (ie postfix) with fetchmail, and then have
the MTA deliver into your maildirs (these are better than mailbox files,
which get very sluggish for the IMAP server to deal with when large, and
also provide atomic message access which avoids locking problems. use
maildirs).

> i want to migrate all my current mailo folders from kmail to whatever setup i 
> have, the mail seems is stored in mbox format, is this going to make a 
> problem in migration? i'm hoping that just copying my current ~/Mail 
> directory is all that will be needed, 

If you have a mail client that supports IMAP as well as local dirs (most
do) then once you have IMAP going, you can create the folders on the
server, and then it's as simple as dragging your mail from the local
ones to the IMAP ones.

> i'm also hoping that i will be able to set gotmail up on the mail box to fetch 
> my hotmail stuff, dump it into the ~/Mail directory and have whatever 
> imap/webmail prog serve it from there?

It'd be 'cleaner' if your hotmail fetching thing sent it's mail into
postfix for delivery in the same way as mail from fetchmail.

> i can see that having two progs serving the same mail repository with two 
> (incl. gotmail) putting into it might be problematic - filelocking perhaps? 

Maildir should be fine provided you funnel all the incoming mail through
one source. I don't see what the other prog serving is - webmail usually
runs through IMAP, and you will use IMAP for a client too. Trivially, 
POP can be considered a degenerate case of IMAP, so most IMAP servers
(eg courier-imap, which is good with maildirs) provide a POP server that
plays with whatever locking/indexing/etc they do.

> i'm also unsure of how filtering is done using imap, will i have to use 
> fetchmail to filter the mail it fetches into the different folders or can the 
> imap prog do that, do imap clients (i've never used imap before) display mail 
> locally according to local rules without changeing how the mail is stored on 
> the imap server? (implication is that i have to set each imap client up 
> individually)

Generally it's harder to apply filtering to incoming mail when it's
stored on IMAP, because for clients there is less of an 'arrival' time
when mail should be filtered, it's just a facet of mail being there when
they view the folder. Evolution may be able to apply vfolders to
messages stored on IMAP.

There are quite a lot of options as to what you can do on the server
though, Cyrus (big beast of an IMAP thing, not particularly recommending
it =) has a server-side filter system called Sieve. You could always use
procmail or maildrop to apply any rules, because besides knowing which
account it came from, fetchmail doesn't filter.

If you wish to have incoming mail from different sources delivered to
different folders, consider using address extensions, like me+hotmail,
user+someisp, etc. You may then be able to convince postfix's local
delivery agent to deliver to folders named after the address extension,
or if you're using procmail/maildrop to deliver and do other filtering,
you can still filter on the extensions.

> does anyone here already do this sort of thing, what would you recommend, i'll 
> be collecting about 2-3 hundred messages a day from a variety of pop3 sources 
> plus fetching the occasional hotmail spam message (to keep the hotmail 
> account alive!)

I'm apalling at mail, it all just heaps into one mailbox and I move
through it all with mutt, pressing d and n to indicate junk, mail I need
to reply to, or neither, and then once I've replied I put it all into
'recieved'. Using Evolution and IMAP with the uni mail system is very
cool, and tempts me to set up something similar to what you're planning.
With some proper filtering too.

> also (already with the also - ed!) i'm thinking of putting this on a seperate 
> box, an old patriot pcbook thing about 3" high and 11" square, it has a 300 
> mhz MII cpu plus it will have an old 1 gb drive and unknown ram (have to get 
> some), does this seem reasonable?

Should be fine.

> flames and dissections welcome

Voila. =)

> bascule

Regards,
Rob