Hello everyone, please keep my CC'd, I'm not on the list. I've been using dovecot happily via an ssh tunnel. My mutt is configured to use IMAP, and the tunnel is as follows in my muttrc:
set tunnel="ssh -q mymailhost 'MBOX_LOCKS=fcntl MAIL=/home/jlbec/mail /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap'"
It should be pretty obvious that this logs into mymailhost as me(via SSH keyauth) and runs /usr/libexec/dovecot/imap directly as a foreground process. Setting MAIL, it points dovecot imap to my mbox folders. dovecot imap speaks imap over stdin/out, this goes over the ssh to mutt. It works great. Really great. I don't need root access at all, the server isn't running dovecot globally, and I get IMAP through firewalls if I can ssh through a firewall/vpn. I'm using mbox and fcntl, so my MTA has no trouble working in concert. However, this doesn't appear to be documented anywhere. A friend showed it to me, and I don't even remember who that was. I'm now considering changing to maildir folders. I figure dovecot imap might figure out a folder is maildir when stat says S_IFDIR, but without documentation, I can't figure out how to tell dovecot imap to use maildir when I create a folder. I'm also unsure how this will interact with my MTA. For the latter, I'm thinking I just need to configure my MTA to use dovecot's deliver program. For the former, is there some magic environment variable I need to add to my tunnel command line?
Thanks Joel
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"The first requisite of a good citizen in this republic of ours is that he shall be able and willing to pull his weight." - Theodore Roosevelt
http://www.jlbec.org/
jlbec@evilplan.org