dovecot - Oct 2005 - Dovecot Setup as just a local IMAP server.

Hey All,

Id just like to start by thanking Timo Sirainen and any others that
helped produce such a great IMAP server, it was a breeze to set up with
no previous experience in mail servers.

What I am trying to do is setup a spare computer to run Dovecot and that
  It stores all my email from my accounts which are all accessed through
POP. This way instead of being tied to one mail client (and hence OS and
Computer) I just set up my mail client to access Dovecot and then I'm
done. So I am trying to set up an IMAP server to store my emails instead
of just storing them on my local hard disk really.

Now so far Ive set up Dovecot and Its working fine, but How would I get
my email accounts mail to be placed in the Inbox of my IMAP account? I'm
think I would need to use either fetchmail or getmail to grab my mail.
After that do these programs just save it in the appropriate IMAP folder
on disk (which would be new?) or do I need a MTA such as qmail setup and
 fetchmail or getmail passes the email to the MTA which just transfers
it locally on the same computer?

So any help would be greatly appreciated as well as advice on which
software to use, the getmail site attacks fetchmail quite strongly, but
I'm not sure of its performance being written in Python as I'm running
on an old Pentium MMX(100MHz) using OpenBSD 3.7.

Sorry for the long email I never can seem to keep them short :)

Cheers,

	David Terei

On Wed, 2005-10-05 at 12:34 +1000, David Terei wrote:
> Now so far Ive set up Dovecot and Its working fine, but How would I get
> my email accounts mail to be placed in the Inbox of my IMAP account?
I'm
> think I would need to use either fetchmail or getmail to grab my mail.
> After that do these programs just save it in the appropriate IMAP folder
> on disk (which would be new?) or do I need a MTA such as qmail setup and
>  fetchmail or getmail passes the email to the MTA which just transfers
> it locally on the same computer?
Mail grabber -> MTA -> procmail -> Dovecot -> MUA

This is how I do it, so yes, this works.

-- 
Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazquez at ivazquez.net>
http://fedora.ivazquez.net/

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On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 12:34:00PM +1000, David Terei
wrote:
> What I am trying to do is setup a spare computer to run Dovecot and that
>   It stores all my email from my accounts which are all accessed through
> POP. This way instead of being tied to one mail client (and hence OS and
> Computer) I just set up my mail client to access Dovecot and then I'm
> done. So I am trying to set up an IMAP server to store my emails instead
> of just storing them on my local hard disk really.
I have essentially the same situation. I have a small number of users
who need to work with their mail from more than one computer. I use
getmail to pull their mail off their POP accounts and put it into the
/var/mail/accountname directory. Then dovecot serves it to whatever
computer and MUA they happen to be using at the moment.

I'm using old hardware, and I haven't had any problems with speed using
getmail. I used fetchmail up until a year ago. I switched to getmail
because it is safer. Getmail runs every 15 minutes as a cron job and
pulls mail from several different POP accounts. I could do it more
frequently without overloading anything. Fetchmail worked fine, but I
can't tell that it worked any better than getmail.

David Terei wrote:

 > Now so far Ive set up Dovecot and Its working fine, but How would I get
 > my email accounts mail to be placed in the Inbox of my IMAP account?
I'm
 > think I would need to use either fetchmail or getmail to grab my mail.
 > After that do these programs just save it in the appropriate IMAP folder
 > on disk (which would be new?) or do I need a MTA such as qmail setup and
 >  fetchmail or getmail passes the email to the MTA which just transfers
 > it locally on the same computer?

I have a setup somewhat along these lines which uses:

- fetchmail to pull mail from my ISP's POP3 server
- exim to handle sending of email as well as routing and delivery of mail
brought in by fetchmail
- dovecot as IMAP server (I used to use UW-IMAP, but switched to dovecot a few
months back, with no regrets)

With UW-IMAP I used mbx format, now I use maildir.

This setup has worked well since July 2000. Some details (not fully up to date)
are provided at:
http://www.homepages.lu/allen/linux.htm

For a long time I ran this on an old 25 MHz 486SX with 20 MB of RAM. Actually it
worked fine. Now I have a 500 MHz
Mini-ITX with 256 MB of RAM.

This setup has the additional advantage that several PCs around the house can
all read and send mail through the central
server, and the mail folders are accessible via IMAP to all PCs.

John


-- 
John Allen
Bofferdange, Luxembourg
allen at vo.lu
http://www.homepages.lu/allen