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@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@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@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