local IMAP server

Kevin J. Cummings cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Wed May 25 21:29:08 UTC 2011


On 05/25/2011 04:42 PM, Lewis NH2 wrote:
> Good Evening,
> 
> I have a SOHO, and I like to access/answer my emails from every
> workstations. Of course everything should be kept up-to-sync.
> Furthermore, I'd like to avoid storing all emails on my ISP. Having a
> local IMAP server and fetching automatically the emails from my ISP
> sounds quite promising at first glance.
> 
> I plan to go for fetchmail to retrieve the email from the ISP and
> dovecot to provide the local IMAP server. Now I am a bit unsure about
> the setup. As far as I can see, it seems that most solutions found on
> the net involves a 3rd agent, for instance procmail.
> 
> Is it possible to go only with fetchmail and dovecot? If I understood
> correctly, dovecot comes up with a LDA that can be directly evoked
> from fetchmail using the mda directive. Is this correct?

Yes.  In addition to running my own email server which dovecot uses as
my initial email store, I also download my ISPs emails from that account
and "deliver them" locally giving me effectively one email Inbox.  I can
read my email (using IMAP) from any workstation in the house (I use
thunderbird on all of them), but I let my laptop do the distribution
into local folders for me (separating my 2-300 emails a day into local
folders for perusal in groups).

> Does someone have succeed in setting such configuration up?

Not the same as you, but similar.

> As I am a noob regarding emails servers technology, any help, advice,
> pointers would be greatly appreciated.

You will need to run a local email server in order to do this, but if
all of your email is coming from your ISP, you should be able to
configure fetchmail to fetch it from your ISP for you and deliver it
locally (to your local server), where dovecot can find it and present it
to your MUA via IMAP.

> TIA,
> Lew.

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at verizon.net
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)


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