[Dovecot] How to troubleshoot LDA or LMTP?

[John Williams]

Sam Flint <harmonicnm7h at gmail.com> writes:

> Gnus supports IMAP natively, and even ManageSieve.  Use that, don't
> run a proxy, it's a lot easier.
I know.  I'm using dovecot because I'm getting mail from an extremely
slow connection, so Gnus blocks the Emacs UI for several seconds, making
Emacs unusable.  Using a local server eliminates that problem.


> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 4:19 AM, Steffen Kaiser
> <skdovecot at smail.inf.fh-brs.de> wrote:
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>> On Thu, 8 Aug 2013, John Williams wrote:
>>
>>>> in order to not filter the same message twice or re-filter messages,
>>>> you've moved around manually?
>>>
>>> That is not a problem.  The filtering process works perfectly when I
>>> manually invoke dovecot-lda.  My problem is that I have followed the
>>> instructions here:
>>>
>>> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/LDA/
>>>
>>> and here:
>>>
>>> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/LDA/Sendmail
>>>
>>> and here:
>>>
>>> http://wiki2.dovecot.org/LMTP
>>>
>>> but neither dovecot-lda nor LMTP seem to be triggered whenever I send
>>> email from my MUA (Gnus).  At least, I *think* I have followed the
>>> instructions correctly.  Would you like me to post my dovecot config
>>> again, and the relevant portion of sendmail.cf?
>>>
>>> Thank you very much for your help, I truly appreciate it.
>>
>>
>> As Stan already pointed out: a local delivery takes place only, when the
>> mail arrives via a MTA. offlineimap synchronizes two IMAP folders, there is
>> no local delivery at your side at all. Hence, neither LDA nor LMTP is
>> invoked.
>>
>> So I see two ways:
>>
>> 1) keep offlineimap to resync your local store back to the server and keep
>> both in-sync.
>>
>> Then you can:
>> 1a) run offlineimap to get new messages from the upstream server and sync
>> current local messages.
>> 1b) remove the new ones from the local store and feed them _manually_ to the
>> LDA or LMTP. Now the filtering takes place and they are re-added to the mail
>> storage.
>> 1c) maybe: re-run the process until no new messages got downloaded, in order
>> to keep the server in-sync
>>
>> 2) no need for server messages in-sync with local message store
>>
>> 2a) setup a local MTA that accepts your domain and drops messages via
>> Dovecot LDA or LMTP. Then get the new messages via fetchmail on a regular
>> basis and hand the messages over to the local MTA.
>>
>> 2b) use fetchmail in combination with Dovecot LDA/LMTP. No local MTA
>> necessary.
>>
>> fetchmail will see only messages in INBOX as far as I know. So no filtering
>> on the server must take place.
>>
>>
>> - -- Steffen Kaiser
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-- 
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Department of Marketing
University of Otago
Dunedin, New Zealand