dovecot - Aug 2010 - Mobile phone client - first access

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!  With my first post to the list, 
may I begin by saying how impressed I have been by Dovecot's 
performance on our Debian server.  We've configured it to run with 
Exim and Fetchmail, using Dovecot to manage professional and domestic 
emails for a small home office, serving a number of Windows and Linux 
clients both on the internal network and, when working overseas, via 
SSH tunnels back to the Debian server.  Dovecot's performance has 
been, simply, rock-solid; a very impressive piece of work by Timo and 
all those supporting him.

My ordinary mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson C510 - includes an email 
client with IMAP capability (and none, TLS, or SSL encryption). 
Configured to access our server across the mobile carrier's network, 
the results surprised me; they were not what I expected.

The first surprise was, it worked.

More seriously, the messages it retrieved were not what I expected; 
the phone received around 58 messages, but from the 'inbox', the 
'junk' box, and a couple from a 'project' box.  I had expected
to only
retrieve the messages that were in the 'inbox'.  How does Dovecot 
'decide' what messages to give the phone client?  [I think I may have 
the wrong 'mental model' of what should have happened, and would 
appreciate being put right.]  Is it possible to configure Dovecot to 
only serve specific boxes?  The mobile phone client is extremely 
simple - it does not have the facility to 'browse' the folders, it 
only has an inbox, sentbox, etc; I have wondered whether there might 
be a 'jar' email client that is richer, and which might help - I will 
look for something anyway.

But I was impressed that my mobile phone could check our home and 
office email while offsite; if I can get that working it will save 
having to fire up the laptop at each opportunity.

Thanks very much for reading this far, and, also, thanks everyone who 
takes the time to contribute to the list,

regards, Ron

On 2010-08-20 10:33:57 +0100, Ron Leach wrote:
> Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:33:57 +0100
> From: Ron Leach <ronleach at tesco.net>
> Subject: [Dovecot] Mobile phone client - first access
> To: dovecot at dovecot.org
> 
> Ladies and gentlemen, good morning!  With my first post to the list,
> may I begin by saying how impressed I have been by Dovecot's
> performance on our Debian server.  We've configured it to run with
> Exim and Fetchmail, using Dovecot to manage professional and
> domestic emails for a small home office, serving a number of Windows
> and Linux clients both on the internal network and, when working
> overseas, via SSH tunnels back to the Debian server.  Dovecot's
> performance has been, simply, rock-solid; a very impressive piece of
> work by Timo and all those supporting him.
> 
> My ordinary mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson C510 - includes an email
> client with IMAP capability (and none, TLS, or SSL encryption).
> Configured to access our server across the mobile carrier's network,
> the results surprised me; they were not what I expected.
> 
> The first surprise was, it worked.
> 
> More seriously, the messages it retrieved were not what I expected;
> the phone received around 58 messages, but from the 'inbox', the
> 'junk' box, and a couple from a 'project' box.  I had
expected to
> only retrieve the messages that were in the 'inbox'.  How does
> Dovecot 'decide' what messages to give the phone client?  [I think
I
> may have the wrong 'mental model' of what should have happened, and
> would appreciate being put right.]  Is it possible to configure
> Dovecot to only serve specific boxes?  The mobile phone client is
> extremely simple - it does not have the facility to 'browse' the
> folders, it only has an inbox, sentbox, etc; I have wondered whether
> there might be a 'jar' email client that is richer, and which might
> help - I will look for something anyway.
> 
> But I was impressed that my mobile phone could check our home and
> office email while offsite; if I can get that working it will save
> having to fire up the laptop at each opportunity.
> 
> Thanks very much for reading this far, and, also, thanks everyone
> who takes the time to contribute to the list,
your phone decides.

you should check if the software on the phone honors the server side
subscription list or has a local one.

    darix

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