dovecot - Jul 2009 - Can Dovecot Proxy GMail?

Hi,

We are using gmail (google apps) across our company with most users
using outlook (windoze) or evolution (linux) and imap/pop based on user
preference. We are having issues in that our internet links are fairly
slow and when users download mails they get frustrated with the time it
takes and often get timeouts and issues where outlook fails to fetch a
mail yet gmail thinks it was retrieved - users then complain of
"missing" emails.

Is there a way that we could use dovecot (or similar?) to act as an imap
"proxy" and users connect to dovecot while dovecot connects to gmail?

Thanks
Paul

Paul Carter-Brown schreef:
> Hi,
> 
> We are using gmail (google apps) across our company with most users
> using outlook (windoze) or evolution (linux) and imap/pop based on user
> preference. We are having issues in that our internet links are fairly
> slow and when users download mails they get frustrated with the time it
> takes and often get timeouts and issues where outlook fails to fetch a
> mail yet gmail thinks it was retrieved - users then complain of
> "missing" emails.
> 
> Is there a way that we could use dovecot (or similar?) to act as an imap
> "proxy" and users connect to dovecot while dovecot connects to
gmail?
> 
> Thanks
> Paul
> 
When you setup a (realtime) proxy that connects to gmail when the user
actually connects to dovecot, retrieving mail is still slow.

You could look into using fetchmail or something like that to pull
everything from gmail and store it local. That way, when your users
connect to dovecot, the mail is already on a local machine and access is
fast. This implies of course that you need to setup fetchmail with the
users' credentials.

--
Regards,
	Tom

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Hi,

I think the best solution would be, to set up a real mail system on site -
"outsourcing" and having a bad connection just doesn't work.
SMTP is much more suitable for server-to-server delivery than POP and IMAP, in
my experience. It has all the error reporting, automatic retry etc. features
for a reason :)

Patrick.

On 2009-07-15 17:02, Tom Hendrikx wrote:
> Paul Carter-Brown schreef:
>> We are using gmail (google apps) across our company with most users
>> using outlook (windoze) or evolution (linux) and imap/pop based on user
>> preference. We are having issues in that our internet links are fairly
>> slow and when users download mails they get frustrated with the time it
>> takes and often get timeouts and issues where outlook fails to fetch a
>> mail yet gmail thinks it was retrieved - users then complain of
>> "missing" emails.
>>
>> Is there a way that we could use dovecot (or similar?) to act as an
imap
>> "proxy" and users connect to dovecot while dovecot connects
to gmail?
> 
> When you setup a (realtime) proxy that connects to gmail when the user
> actually connects to dovecot, retrieving mail is still slow.
> 
> You could look into using fetchmail or something like that to pull
> everything from gmail and store it local. That way, when your users
> connect to dovecot, the mail is already on a local machine and access is
> fast. This implies of course that you need to setup fetchmail with the
> users' credentials.
- -- 
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