dovecot - Apr 2009 - How do I get my mail from fetchmail into dovecot?

I have dovecot (with squirrel mail etc.) running without any problems
but cannot understand how to get e-mail from a pop server into dovecot.
I have fetchmail configured to pick up the mail from the pop3 server but
don't understand how to get it from there into my dovecot mbox
structure.

New to mail servers!

Thanks,

Michael.

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Michael Steinbeck-Reeves <
michael at steinbeck-reeves.uk.com> wrote:
> I have dovecot (with squirrel mail etc.) running without any problems
> but cannot understand how to get e-mail from a pop server into dovecot.
> I have fetchmail configured to pick up the mail from the pop3 server but
> don't understand how to get it from there into my dovecot mbox

Where does fetchmail put the e-mails?
Point dovecot there with "mail_location =..." then use your favorite
MuA to
access the e-mail.


-- 
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"Clothes make the man.  Naked people have little or no influence on
society."
              -- Mark Twain

On Wednesday 29 April 2009 15:46:05 Michael Steinbeck-Reeves
wrote:
> I have dovecot (with squirrel mail etc.) running without any problems
> but cannot understand how to get e-mail from a pop server into
> dovecot. I have fetchmail configured to pick up the mail from the
> pop3 server but don't understand how to get it from there into my
> dovecot mbox structure.
My advice: forget Fetchmail and use Getmail [1] instead. Getmail does 
everything Fetchmail does, only better. The documentation is excellent, 
the author (and mailinglist) very responsive should you run into 
problems you can't seem to solve on your own and I believe there exist 
a number of HOWTOs on how to setup Getmail with Dovecot. Not that it's 
very difficult, though.

I myself have such a "mail hamster" setup running just fine, which I 
mentioned a few weeks ago on this list [2]. You might find that post 
helpful.

The general idea is to use Getmail to poll the remote mail servers (I 
poll two POP servers and three IMAP-SSL servers), retrieve messages, 
optionally scan them for viruses and spam and then hand them over to 
your local Dovecot server using Dovecot's LDA "deliver". See [3]
for a
nice picture :) If you skip virus and spam scanning the configuration 
for a single remote IMAP server boils down to:

~/.getmail/remote_imap_server.rc:

[options]
verbose = 0
read_all = false

[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = address_of_remote_imap_server
username = username_on_remote_server
password = password_on_remote_server

[destination]
type = MDA_external
path = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver

The destination part tells getmail to call the "deliver" program 
(without any commandline options) with the retrieved message. Dovecot 
then does the rest.

HTH

Andreas

[1] http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/
[2] http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2009-March/038074.html
[3] http://img394.imageshack.us/img394/6148/mailhamster.png
-- 
Andreas Ntaflos 
Vienna, Austria 

GPG Fingerprint: 6234 2E8E 5C81 C6CB E5EC  7E65 397C E2A8 090C A9B4

> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:27:46 +0200
> From: Andreas Ntaflos <daff at dword.org>
> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] How do I get my mail from fetchmail into
> 	dovecot?
> > I have dovecot (with squirrel mail etc.) running without any problems
> > but cannot understand how to get e-mail from a pop server into
> > dovecot. I have fetchmail configured to pick up the mail from the
> > pop3 server but don't understand how to get it from there into my
> > dovecot mbox structure.
> 
> My advice: forget Fetchmail and use Getmail [1] instead. Getmail does 
> everything Fetchmail does, only better. The documentation is excellent, 
> the author (and mailinglist) very responsive should you run into 
> problems you can't seem to solve on your own and I believe there exist 
> a number of HOWTOs on how to setup Getmail with Dovecot. Not that it's 
> very difficult, though.
Thanks, I have changed over and your diagrams made it much more obvious
what is actually going on.
> I myself have such a "mail hamster" setup running just fine,
which I
> mentioned a few weeks ago on this list [2]. You might find that post 
> helpful.
> 
> The general idea is to use Getmail to poll the remote mail servers (I 
> poll two POP servers and three IMAP-SSL servers), retrieve messages, 
> optionally scan them for viruses and spam and then hand them over to 
> your local Dovecot server using Dovecot's LDA "deliver". See
[3] for a
> nice picture :) If you skip virus and spam scanning the configuration 
> for a single remote IMAP server boils down to:
> 
> ~/.getmail/remote_imap_server.rc:
> 
> [options]
> verbose = 0
> read_all = false
> 
> [retriever]
> type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
> server = address_of_remote_imap_server
> username = username_on_remote_server
> password = password_on_remote_server
> 
> [destination]
> type = MDA_external
> path = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver
> 
> The destination part tells getmail to call the "deliver" program 
> (without any commandline options) with the retrieved message. Dovecot 
> then does the rest.
That seems simple - thanks.

Do I just put a list of retrievers, one after the other with a single
destination following that and let dovecot sort out the destinations?

The only thing I don't understand and can't find/understand in the
documentation is how to tell the LDA where to put my e-mails. I have
mails to several addresses mixed up in several POP3 boxes and need to
sort them out and deliver them based on the target address. e.g.
michael at domain1 and michael at domain2 go to my box etc. I can't see
where
I identify the addresses and allocate the appropriate storage area.

Thanks,

Michael