On Thu, 25 Oct 2012 12:13:34 -0700 (PDT), Bradley Rintoul said:

This could be good. I'd never looked into the LDA - I will study up on it.

Someone else was helping out here and I thought I'd shed some more light on what I'm doing here...

Let's say someone has an account with Yahoo, for example. My Python code is fetching email from the user's Yahoo! account and placing it into the Dovecot Maildir storage for a particular user. Now when the user retrieves their mail, they are doing so using my Dovecot - my Dovecot instance is acting as a proxy, of sorts...

Thanks for the responses!

(Is there an IRC channel?)

Hi Bradley,

I'm doing almost the exact same thing, but with fetchmail and procmail. I go out and grab my email from about five different places using fetchmail, which feeds the messages to procmail, with .procmailrc deciding where in the Dovecot maildir tree to put them.

Your only need I *haven't* accomplished is having different users get their mail from my Dovecot, and to make sure each users' email goes where they can get it via IMAP connection to your Dovecot. If you can get different IMAP mailboxes for different users, you can put each user in .procmailrc so as to deliver to the correct box.

Anyway, Procmail knows exactly how to submit an email to Dovecot, so you don't need to worry about actually placing the file into the tree, or anything like that.

You mention you've written some Python code. If the purpose of your Python code is just to retrieve from SMTP servers, you can drop your Python code in favor of Fetchmail and Procmail. If your Python code actually does something with the emails, you can call a subset of your Python code from Procmail, to do its magic on each email.

Here's how my fetchmail is running:

29588 ? Ss 0:21 fetchmail -f /home/slitt/.fetchmailrc

And here's a partial view of my .fetchmailrc, showing my retrieval from Bluehost and gmail:

=================================== set postmaster "slitt" set bouncemail set no spambounce set properties "" set daemon 180

#poll mail.a3b3.com protocol POP3: poll mail.a3b3.com protocol IMAP: user 'slitt@troubleshooters.com' there is 'slitt' here pass wouldnt_you_like_to_know limit 50000000 warnings 3200 expunge 60 ssl #Use ssl encryption sslcommonname "*.bluehost.com"
sslcertck
mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" fetchall;

poll imap.gmail.com protocol IMAP user 'litttest@gmail.com' there is 'slitt' here pass 'I_just_cant_say' #portnumber 993 limit 50000000 warnings 3200 expunge 60 mda "/usr/bin/procmail -d %T" fetchlimit 50 ssl;

Do you notice the "mda" line on both pulls? That means "use procmail as your mda", which just ships each email to Procmail. Procmail knows exactly how to deliver stuff to Dovecot.

The following are the top several lines of my .procmailrc:

=================================== DEFAULT=$HOME/mail/Maildir/.INBOX/ MAILDIR=$HOME/mail/Maildir/ LOCKFILE=$HOME/mail/.lock VERBOSE=no LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail/log #GARBAGE=.garbage/ GARBAGE=/dev/null PURGATORY=.garbage/ SUPREMUM=9876543210 #PROCMAIL SUPREMUM NUMBER, SEE http://www.perlcode.org/tutorials/procmail/proctut/proctip2.pod

#### HANDLE STUFF FROM littdom@gmail.com and litttest@gmail.com ####

:0:

• ^Delivered-To:.*littdom@gmail.com .littdom_gmail/

:0:

• ^Delivered-To:.*litttest@gmail.com .litttest_gmail/

A few explanations: First, I couldn't include my actual filters, because they are full of very unflattering comments concerning various trolls, ignos, blabbermouths, and proudly helpless fools.

The $MAILDIR environment variable is the rood directory of your Maildir tree. $DEFAULT is the location of the main inbox for that -- I think it's where you put email that doesn't get routed elsewhere by Procmail. $GARBAGE is an environment var I made up as code for where filtered stuff gets sent. It's usually /dev/null because I don't want to see that junk again. However, I can temporarily change it to an actual IMAP directory for troubleshooting. $PURGATORY is junk that I actually want to OK the deletion of. I actually currently have nothing filtered to $PURGATORY, but it's there. $SUPREMUM is a very large number that is used in making OR logic, which is otherwise difficult. I couldn't make the $SUPREMUM env var work, so I had to use a literal, and here's a way I got all my magazines into one mailbox:

:0:

• 9876543210^0 ^From.*onsale.com
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*pcmag.com
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*itworld.com
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*networkworld.info
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*infoworld.com
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*whatsnewnow.com
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*eweek.com
• 9876543210^0 ^From.*computerworld.com .mags/

By the way, BE SURE to note the slash after the directory name. That trailing slash tells Procmail that it's delivering to a Maildir, not to an (ugh) mbox.

Anyway, I think you and I are doing very similar things, albeit for very different reasons. My motivation is that I consider all currently available email clients to be junk, and don't want them holding my email, so I hold it in a Dovecot hosted Maildir instead.

I'll be interested in how you solve this. Please keep me (and probably everyone on this list) in the loop.

Thank you so much!

SteveT

Steve Litt * http://www.troubleshooters.com/ * http://twitter.com/stevelitt Troubleshooting Training * Human Performance