[Dovecot] Problem with dovecot on home LAN

[Timothy Murphy]

At present I get email directly on my laptop
in /var/spool/mail/* through uucp.
I'd like to get the email in the same directory
on my desktop (alfred), and then run a mail server on the destop
and collect the email on my laptop (william)
(or on other computers on my two little home LANs, ethernet and WiFi).

I was advised that dovecot was a good imap server for this purpose
(I tried cyrus-imapd, but decided it was too complicated),
so I'm running dovecot on alfred (my desktop),
with the following /etc/dovecot.conf (minus comments):
============================================
imap_listen = *
pop3_listen = *
login_dir = /var/run/dovecot-login
login = imap
login = pop3
default_mail_env = mbox:~/mail/:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u
mbox_locks = fcntl
auth = default
auth_mechanisms = plain
auth_userdb = passwd
auth_passdb = pam
auth_user = root
auth_verbose = yes
============================================

I am able to access my desktop with telnet from my laptop:
============================================
[tim at william ~]$ telnet alfred 143
Trying 192.168.1.1...
Connected to alfred.
Escape character is '^]'.
* OK dovecot ready.
x login tim <password>
x OK Logged in.
^]
telnet> quit
Connection closed.
============================================

Unfortunately, neither fetchmail not KMail on my laptop
seem able to retrieve mail from my desktop.

With fetchmail I get the error message:
============================================
[tim at william ~]$ fetchmail alfred
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost.localdomain != alfred
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost.localdomain != alfred
10 messages for tim at alfred.
reading message tim at alfred.murphy.ie:1 of 10 (765 header octets) fetchmail:
fetchmail: getaddrinfo(localhost.smtp)
fetchmail: SMTP connect to localhost failed
fetchmail: SMTP transaction error while fetching from alfred
fetchmail: Query status=10 (SMTP)
============================================

My .fetchmailrc on william reads
============================================
poll alfred
        proto IMAP
        user "tim" password "whatever"
============================================

I have no better luck trying to retrieve mail with KMail on the laptop,
after adding the following entry to
KMail=>Settings=>Configure KMail=>Network=>Receiving
==============================================
Name: dovecot
Login: tim
Password: <password>
Host: alfred
Port: 143
Prefix to folders: /var/spool/mail/
==============================================
(I also tried with "Prefix to folders:" empty.)

When I start KMail on william I get the message
"Checking account dovecot for new mail",
but no mail comes over,
and I see no error in the log files on either machine
(although I may have missed something there).

I should say that I am running Fedora-3
with all programs up-to-date.

Apologies for the long message;
any suggestions of advice gratefully received.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland