[Dovecot] How do I get my mail from fetchmail into dovecot?

[Andreas Ntaflos]

On Thursday 30 April 2009 12:22:17 Michael Steinbeck-Reeves wrote:
> > Message: 1
> > Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:27:46 +0200
> > From: Andreas Ntaflos <daff at dword.org>
> > Subject: Re: [Dovecot] How do I get my mail from fetchmail into
> > 	dovecot?
> >
> > > I have dovecot (with squirrel mail etc.) running without any
> > > problems but cannot understand how to get e-mail from a pop
> > > server into dovecot. I have fetchmail configured to pick up the
> > > mail from the pop3 server but don't understand how to get it from
> > > there into my dovecot mbox structure.
> >
> > My advice: forget Fetchmail and use Getmail [1] instead. Getmail
> > does everything Fetchmail does, only better. The documentation is
> > excellent, the author (and mailinglist) very responsive should you
> > run into problems you can't seem to solve on your own and I believe
> > there exist a number of HOWTOs on how to setup Getmail with
> > Dovecot. Not that it's very difficult, though.
>
> Thanks, I have changed over and your diagrams made it much more
> obvious what is actually going on.
>
> > I myself have such a "mail hamster" setup running just fine, which
> > I mentioned a few weeks ago on this list [2]. You might find that
> > post helpful.
> >
> > The general idea is to use Getmail to poll the remote mail servers
> > (I poll two POP servers and three IMAP-SSL servers), retrieve
> > messages, optionally scan them for viruses and spam and then hand
> > them over to your local Dovecot server using Dovecot's LDA
> > "deliver". See [3] for a nice picture :) If you skip virus and spam
> > scanning the configuration for a single remote IMAP server boils
> > down to:
> >
> > ~/.getmail/remote_imap_server.rc:
> >
> > [options]
> > verbose = 0
> > read_all = false
> >
> > [retriever]
> > type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
> > server = address_of_remote_imap_server
> > username = username_on_remote_server
> > password = password_on_remote_server
> >
> > [destination]
> > type = MDA_external
> > path = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver
> >
> > The destination part tells getmail to call the "deliver" program
> > (without any commandline options) with the retrieved message.
> > Dovecot then does the rest.
>
> That seems simple - thanks.
>
> Do I just put a list of retrievers, one after the other with a single
> destination following that and let dovecot sort out the destinations?

Normally you have one RC file per remote server your want to poll, with 
each RC file looking quite like the example I gave. Create a cron job 
for Getmail to run periodically and tell it which RC files to use:

# Run every two minutes and get mail from the specified servers
*/2 * * * * /usr/bin/getmail \ 
    --rcfile /home/daff/.getmail/dword.org.rc \
    --rcfile /home/daff/.getmail/gmx.at.rc \
    [...]

Refer to the Getmail docs for further info.

> The only thing I don't understand and can't find/understand in the
> documentation is how to tell the LDA where to put my e-mails. I have
> mails to several addresses mixed up in several POP3 boxes and need to
> sort them out and deliver them based on the target address. e.g.
> michael at domain1 and michael at domain2 go to my box etc. I can't see
> where I identify the addresses and allocate the appropriate storage
> area.

This is where Sieve shines. If you don't use Sieve then the LDA 
(deliver) will just put any messages handed to it by Getmail into your 
top-level INBOX. With Sieve you can specify rules and tell the LDA what 
to do with each message. You should read up on Sieve [1], Sieve in 
Dovecot [2] and Dovecot's LDA [3]. Once you configured the LDA to 
understand Sieve you can create rules like the following:

~/.dovecot.sieve:

# Messages from the Dovecot list end up in the IMAP folder
# INBOX.dword.dovecot-users
if header :contains ["List-Id"] 
    ["Dovecot Mailing List <dovecot.dovecot.org>"] 
{
    fileinto "INBOX.dword.dovecot-users";
    stop;
}

# All messages addressed directly to me shall end up in
# the IMAP folder INBOX.dword
if header :matches ["to","cc","bcc"]
  ["*daff at dword.org*"]  
{
    fileinto "INBOX.dword";
    stop;
}

# Another account I have. Put those messages in 
# the IMAP folder INBOX.gmx.
if address :contains ["to","cc","bcc"] 
    ["my.address at gmx.at"] 
{
    fileinto "INBOX.gmx";
    stop;
}

Dovecot's Sieve support is excellent, thanks to Stephan Bosch. There is 
much more documentation out there than I can possibly provide or link 
to in this post but I think it gets the point across. 

Hope this helps :)

Andreas

[1] http://sieve.info/
[2] http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve
[3] http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA
-- 
Andreas Ntaflos 
Vienna, Austria 

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