On Mon, Jun 03, 2002 at 09:38:37PM -0400, Jason Bleazard wrote: > I've found a lot of good documentation about IMAP, fetchmail and > procmail individually. However, I'm trying to figure out how to make > them all work together and I'm afraid I don't quite get it. I've tried > some Google searches and found myself overwhelmed with information that > didn't really apply to my situation. If anyone could point me toward > some good documents or offer a few pointers, I'd sure appreciate it. > I'm just looking to download from three POP3 accounts and serve e-mail > to two users (myself and my wife), so I don't need a large capacity > setup. > > Read further if you want to know more details of what I want to do. > > We have a (modest :-) home network of four machines scattered around the > house, running a mix of Debian and Windows. I'm building a fifth to act > as a central file server, and I'd like to put our e-mail on there as > well. > > Our ISP has their e-mail set up with POP access for downloading and an > SMTP server for sending. Pretty standard stuff. Their setup guide just > tells us to configure these servers directly in Outlook or Netscape. > This works okay, but it pretty well ties my e-mail to one machine, mail > program and/or operating system on our network. > > I figure the best way to centrailize our mail is to set up an IMAP > server. I know that I need fetchmail to bring our mail in from our > ISP. I also know that I can use procmail to filter incoming messages to > different folders (for example, I want debian-user messages to go to > their own directory). It's a DSL connection that's active pretty much > all the time, so I don't need to worry about triggering it manually. I > can just let it grab stuff every so often. > > Unfortunately, I can't grasp how to get everything working together. > Does fetchmail automagically filter things through procmail once the > latter is set up? How do I get procmail to play nice with IMAP > folders? Does it matter if I use mbox or maildir format?
AFAIK the standard way to pass mail to procmail is via .forward which is heeded by local MDA. A line such as |/usr/local/bin/procmail should do the trick. I don't know a lot about IMAP servers, but it depends on how they implement their mail storage. At a guess, mbox format might play nice with procmail. > > Also, I'm not sure how to set up exim, or if there's another alternative > that would be better suited for what I want to do. I've noticed that if > I get any mail from cron it sits in my local mailbox on each machine, so > I get the new mail notice when I log in to that machine. It would be > nice if all the machines on the network could send stuff to my central > IMAP inbox. Should be possible via a .forward or similar > > Do I need to really worry about remote mail routing, or should I just > tell my mail client to connect directly to my ISP's SMTP server (the way > it is now)? With only two users, I can't really think of a reason I'd > need to send mail internally other than messages from cron, and they > don't use my mail client anyway. > > Our ISP gives us up to 6 e-mail accounts. One thing I'd like to do is > set up one or more of them so that any mail sent to that address will be > forwarded to both of us. My thinking is to create a dummy user account > that receives the e-mail from the special address, then that account's > procmail settings forward the message to both of our regular accounts. > I want two copies, not just a single IMAP inbox that we both access > (then we get questions like "did you read that? Can I delete it?") I'd be doing something pretty close to that, fetchmail to a "special" user account, then .forward from that account to the other two "normal" accounts. > > The reason I want to use procmail is I'm hoping once I get that set up, > I can then do some intelligent filtering on messages. Some things > should go to me, some things to my wife, and some things to both of us. The trick will be to avoid duplication of effort. Hopefully you can find a way to do some "common" filtering that applies to all your mail, and then apply specific filtering to your mail individually. Others might have some ideas on this... -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
