[Dovecot] new user questions

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 14 July 2013 07:28:21 Paul van der Vlis did opine:

> On 13-07-13 19:56, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > Greetings;
> > 
> > Trying to follow along with the wiki2 setup instructions and thought
> > I'd hit a snag with the first "send me a mail" snippet as it took
> > several minutes to arrive, so I assume that somehow procmail was
> > involved in the delivery and my procmail runs mail thought a whole
> > bunch of checks before finally handing it off to a mailfile as
> > /var/mail/gene.
> 
> Normally procmail is called from the MTA, e.g. Postfix.
> If you use Postfix disable this line in /etc/postfix/main.cf:
> mailbox_command = procmail -a "$EXTENSION"
> 
> Look at /var/log/mail.log for more information.
> 
> > Then the next script seems to only try whats in my home dir, and of
> > course doesn't find it as neither exists, yet...
> > 
> > I assume that is because dovecot needs a kill -HUP.  But I am not
> > familiar with that, so how is it done, and as what user, me, or root,
> > on a ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS install?
> 
> I don't know what the wiki exactly says. But what you can do is a
> "service dovecot restart" as root.
> 
> I think your questions are more MTA questions then Dovecot questions.
> 
> With regards,
> Paul van der Vlis.

I should have been a bit more verbose.

My present setup uses fetchmail to call mailfilter, and scans 3 different 
mail servers for what survives mailfilter, handing the survivors  to the 
MTA duties of procmail.

Procmail in turn uses a bunch of recipes to black hole a few, then calls 
Spamd, clamd to catch and or mark the mail.  What survives winds up as 
mailfiles in /var/spool/mail.

I have a bash script that uses inotifywait to watch that spool dir, and 
when a file has been written and closed, inotifywait exits, returning the 
filename to my script, which in turn sends kmail a 'get this mail' to kmail 
over the dbus facility.  And restarts inotifywait  In this manner, with 
fetchmail doing 3 minute sleeps between runs, mail arrives in a fairly 
timely manner, usually around 3 or 4 seconds processing time from the port 
blinks on the router to an incremented count of unread messages in whatever 
folder kmail stores the mail in.

kmail is so broken for the version installed for Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS that it 
will not even start, hence the push to get claws working in imap mode, 
using dovecot on this machine as the imap server so that I can then access 
my email from any of the other 5 machines on my local network.  It a bit of 
a PIMA to be out in the shop, carving metal on one of my cnc'd machines and 
have to run back to the house to check the mail because it isn't on an imap 
server.

I am assuming that claws-mail can do filtering to individual "folders" in 
the same manner that kmail now sorts, putting anything from dovecot.org, in 
the dovecot folder as one example.  I'd also at this point assume I can use 
a cron job to synchronize the claws-mail filtering lists, but that is of 
course not a dovecot problem.

And of course I need to keep record copies of both incoming and replied to 
mails like this kmail does.  Which is part of the problem here because of 
the size of the corpus, 4.5Gb in ~/gene/Mail, and for some unk reason, 
~/gene/kde/.../nepomuk/.../sopranodb and virtuosodb are using 16 gigabytes!
If I don't stop, and restart kmail at about 12 hour intervals, it gets so 
slow its pathetic.  I had to convert kmail from mailfiles to maildirs 
several years ago because an earlier versions math could nut handle a 
single mailfile above 2.1Gb.

I assume that dovecot can take the incoming mail in /var/spool/mail, 
leaving those files zero'd out, put it into an assigned dir in the users 
home dir, then serve it up to that user?

So what I'd like to do is have dovecot serve up everything it finds in 
/var/spool/mail to any claws-mail client that sends the correct password to 
my local ipv4 network address ###.###.###.##:143.  ipv6 has not arrived in 
any detectable form here in West Virginia.

I am also assuming that claws-mail can handle its own mail sending, or does 
it depend on the imaps to do that?, at this initial stage I don't know.  So 
far, I don't even have claws-mail set to look for an imaps.  I suppose 
that's next because I'll need a way to test dovecot as I set it up.

What do I put, in which file, in /etc/dovecot/conf.d to achieve that?

The wiki2 pages I know about, but are a bit short on examples to define the 
exact syntax IMO.

Thank you.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up!