Gene Heskett wrote:
On Thursday 03 December 2015 06:56:53 deloptes wrote:
How hard would it be to setup an imap server on this machine, that uses the existing email corpus database, /home/gene/Mail, and serves it to any other kmail agents running on my local network?
I am using devecot imap on the server at home and access the mailbox on that server from multiple clients. There is nothing special for that.
You have to tell dovecot where your mail is and in which format. usually I would configure the server side mailbox aside from the home directory. You could use imap to copy your local mailbox data to the server dir after you set it up once.
Thats quite a few gigabytes, and a duplication operation.
I would allocate a partition for mail in that case, but you'll save the same amount of space in the user home.
This is in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf
you can use anything like fetchmail to get mails to the mailbox and serve it to all clients. If you have any other pop3 accounts. This is what I would do. Thus you collect your mails in one mailbox and access them via imap by any client.
Here, fetchmail hands off to procmail which delivers that which survives the spamassassin an clam inspections, and delivers it delivers to 1 of 3 /var/spool/mail/mailfiles.
all good so far - only regarding /var/spool/mail - this looks like local mailbox in flat file format where you move the message using Kmail into another mailbox and sub dir in maildir format
Me, a niece, and virii. inotifywait sees the file closing, and if its me or the niece, sends kmail over the message buss flavor of the week, a get the mail message. kmail goes and gets it, sorting it to the correct folder, so the incoming mail lands in foldername/cur. And there are about 40 some foldernames.
One copy of the email corpus should be sufficient. Can dovecot be trained to go look in ~/Mail/*/cur?
(if it has Mail/*/cur - it is a maildir format - which is faster and good)
What I don't understand why would you do this. You would probably better rework all of this and end up with a single maildir
/var/spool/dovecot/<USERNAME>/Mail/
So in theory you could move your Mail dir to /var/spool/dovecot/<USERNAME>/ or point dovecot to your maildir.
I setup the template in exim to point to the users dovecot maildir, where it gets served
MAILDIR_HOME_MAILDIR_LOCATION = /var/spool/dovecot/$local_part/Mail
and this is it
I think however you are still mixing up the local Mail provided by Kmail default and the one that is offered by imap server. It took me also a while back then to get it. With imap you won't have to keep a local copy of the mail and you have option to create filters etc and manage the individual mails.
I also had my mailbox set in the user home years ago and this was I guess by default set by Kmail, but turned to be misleading.
However the flexibility of all this is so big that there is surely a way to get what you want or get it really wrong.
Its the really wrong that bothers me.
Well - this means make a backup and turn off your fetchers - play arround and see what you'll get
I hope this helps
Perhaps. I'll install it and the docs and do some reading.
Does dovecot do a broadcast so that clients can find it, or is a complex kmail setup required at the client side?
The setup is really simple on Kmail client side - same/similar as pop3 account.
The challenge for me was to read all the exim/dovecot docs and bound all to fit together. Since then it is a pleasure.
I hope this helps
regards