[Dovecot] dbus support in dovecot?

[Stan Hoeppner]

On 7/25/2013 8:02 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Thursday 25 July 2013 08:38:33 Steffen Kaiser did opine:
> 
>> there might be a misunderstanding here, Dovecot is an IMAP and POP3
>> server. It ships tools that replicate messages from other Dovecot
>> servers and in limits from other IMAP servers.
>>
>> If you intend to POP other servers, copy their messages to one local
>> host and view your messages "offline", I would keep fetchmail and Co.
> 
> That is the gist of what I have in mind.
> 
> Dovecot can I assume, watch the mailfiles in /var/spool/mail?

It can be configured to do so.  Or it can be configured to directly
receive the mail via pipe from Postfix using LDA or LMTP, and then write
it to /var/spool/mail in mbox format, or to user maildirs.

> My present method of using inotifywait wrapped in a bash script to tell 
> kmail to go get the new mail via a dbus message has worked well for years.  
> But with no previous experience with imap, I haven't a clue how new mail 
> arrival is handled in that sort of a setup.

Instant notification is built into IMAP4 w/the IDLE command.  See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE

>> Or when it suits more, maybe imapsync. If you keep that chain any local
>> mailer should be able to pick up the locally spooled messages. Maybe
>> you could switch to Maildir as backend, in order to minimizes locking
>> issues. Of course, you could serve that local mail spool with Dovecot
>> to other IMAP or POP3 clients.
> 
> Already "pigeonhole"d or "sieve"d into the usual folder format?  Once I get 
> the sorting filter rules re manufactured, that would be great!

Not sure what you mean by "the usual folder format".  Sieve will sort
into your IMAP folders.  These may or may not have a 1:1 correlation to
filesystem folders.  Depends on the mailbox storage format you choose.

>> You also could fetchmail the remote hosts and inject them into a local
>> Dovecot server via LMTP, you can then try to run clamav and spamd from
>> Sieve and you have the other Sieve-capabilities as well.
> 
> LTMP is a new acronym to me.  Sorry. Synonymous to an MTA?  Effectively 
> replacing procmail with dovecot and sieve but still using spamd and clamav?

LMTP, Local Mail Transport protocol, is a subset of SMTP.  It can be
used locally or over the wire.  With the Dovecot LMTP implementation,
Sieve takes action on messages when they arrive, and Dovecot's indexes
are updated appropriately as well.  I'm not sure about spamd and clamav
integration here.  The vast majority of people using Dovecot deliver the
mail via Postfix with LDA or LMTP, and do their AS/AV filtering in
Postfix, where SPamassassin and clamav are but two of many possible
packages.  Many people run both of these via amavisd-new.

> Are there any better tutorials than Steve Litt's?, which seem to be getting 
> a tad dated now.

I'm not familiar with these tutorials.

What I would suggest Gene, if possible, is using the 'standard'
Postfit/Dovecot config, doing AS/AV in Postfix, have an upstream system
gather the mail from your various POP mailboxes and deliver them to an
address hosted by Postfix via SMTP.  In other words, push all of the non
standard IMAP server methodology away from, upstream of, your Dovecot
installation.  I'd think one of the mailbox collation services could do
this.  I.e.  POP a dozen mailboxes and forward all the mail to a single
SMTP address.  Maybe fetchmail can do this.  I've never used it.

You may want to ask about this as OT on SDLU.  Hundreds of years of
combined mail experience there.

-- 
Stan