On Thursday 25 July 2013 22:45:04 Stan Hoeppner did opine:
On 7/25/2013 2:45 PM, Gene Heskett wrote:
However, I would really like to start with some in depth docs, docs I am not having a lot of luck finding. But I am not, as you can see, too bashful to go ask the source. ;)
The main problem you're facing right now is that you don't really yet grasp what IMAP is all about.
Is wiki2 the sum total of the docs for this? If it is the definitive manual, great.
In a nutshell, once you install Dovecot, or any IMAP server, it becomes the single point of control and access to all of your mail. You install an IMAP MUA on each client PC, point these at Dovecot, and you're basically done. They can all be logged into the same account simultaneously, and any new mail will show up in the INBOX on all clients simultaneously, or nearly so.
This restriction to the INBOX bothers me because the present kmail setup
I'm using has about 55 individual folders such that messages from a mailing
list are sorted by kmail and placed in the appropriate folder/directory.
That includes this mailing list.
You typically don't need to configure the clients other than telling them where the server is and plugging in login credentials. The rest is pretty much automatic. Any folders the user has access to should display automatically without needing to manually subscribe. At least this is how it works with Thunderbird.
I know t-bird can do this message sorting when it is functioning as its own fetchmail as I have done that on my lappy when I am "on the road" which in this case might be yet another tv station that needs a consultant engineer, either to clean up the technical messes other "engineers" have constructed, or in the case of one station in upstate MI that doesn't have engineering staff, so I get flown in with the owners airplane when it upchucks. The market there is way too small to support a local tv station, but the commission put a license there anyway.
But back to t-bird, can it be made to look the same in terms of folders vs folder contents, with say 3 local copies, one on this box, and one each on the boxes running the cnc machines? All accomplished hopefully by getting one copy working, and copying its configs to the other 2, or maybe 3 machines. I use the lappy in the shop to ssh into the cnc boxes so I can sit in relative comfort when making more copies of some part. 90% of the stuff I do is one off's, but I might need a 12 pack of a custom bolt or ??
In other words, with an IMAP server, you simply ditch most of your old way of doing things with your MUAs. The only program that will write/read your mail files will be the IMAP server, Dovecot in this case. All the clients must access mail through an IMAP connection.
Where does dovecot actually keep the email corpus?
I am assuming that is an assignment in 10-master.conf, but there is a quite lengthy list of stuff in the dovecot/conf.d tree that I haven't been able to find in the wiki2 pages. Sure, I can grep for a given variables name, but first, I need to know the name of the variable... Classic new user chicken v egg stuff.
My present du -h on /home/gene/Mail is about 4.8Gb, and the databases kmail keeps for indices etc (and there seems to be an ever growing list of etc's, all convinced they have to have their own copies of everything) aren't there, but total another 16Gb at other locations on my HD's, between soprano and virtuoso. That alone is enough to convince me kmail has got to go. And the kde folks simply will not entertain the suggestion they have bloated it out of viability for even a user willing to restart it daily, and reboot the machine on a weekly basis because it gets so laggy.
Thank you Stan.
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! My views http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits. A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than 200 million guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens.