I am installing Dovecot for the sole purpose of maintaining a local mail store that I could 1) manage with any client; 2) keep duplicated on several machines, using Unison; 3) hopefully, index using Spotlight (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.mail.mh-e.user/1308 ...). In particular, I have no intention to allow connections from anywhere but localhost.

I've followed the instructions at http://wiki.dovecot.org/HowTo/Rootless and it all seems to work quite well, but I'm not sure about 3 things:

1. Initially Dovecot would not respond to Thunderbird ("Could not connect to server localhost; the connection was refused"). Eventually, a "Trying ::1..." in the telnet log (see below) made me find hidden pref "network.dns.disableIPv6" and set it to FALSE. Which solves the problem -- but is this really needed, or have I done something wrong?

2. The Dovecot I built on OS X 10.4 appears to work fine when copied on another Mac running 10.5. Now, I'd love to avoid installing developer tools on both machines, but I fear this an illusion (some libraries are changing under us, e.g. libiconv.2.2.0.dylib --> libiconv.2.4.0.dylib). Does this mean I should try a static build? If so, what are the flags and how do I go about specifying a minimal set of libraries to include for my purposes?

3. Probably offtopic here, but has anyone seen a better way to index mail in Spotlight than just as plain text? E.g. to hook up Apple's importer (Mail.mdimporter in /System/Library/Spotlight) or Thunderbird's (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290057), which I guess can better deal with quoted-printable and other encodings?

Thanks in advance; I include my compilation and config data below. Francois Z.

mini:~ fz$ curl -O http://www.dovecot.org/releases/1.1/dovecot-1.1.2.tar.gz mini:~ fz$ tar xzf dovecot-1.1.2.tar.gz mini:~ fz$ cd dovecot-1.1.2 mini:~/dovecot-1.1.2 fz$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/sw mini:~/dovecot-1.1.2 fz$ make mini:~/dovecot-1.1.2 fz$ make install mini:~ fz$ cd mini:~ fz$ sw/sbin/dovecot Warning: fd limit 256 is lower than what Dovecot can use under full load (more than 640). Either grow the limit or change login_max_processes_count and max_mail_processes settings mini:~ fz$ telnet localhost 10143 Trying ::1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'.

• OK Dovecot ready. . login fz ******** . OK Logged in. . list "" *
• LIST (\HasNoChildren) "." "Drafts"
• LIST (\HasNoChildren) "." "Trash"
• LIST (\HasNoChildren) "." "INBOX" . OK List completed. . logout
• BYE Logging out . OK Logout completed. Connection closed by foreign host. mini:~ fz$ sw/sbin/dovecot -n

1.1.2: /Volumes/Home/FZ/sw/etc/dovecot.conf

Warning: fd limit 256 is lower than what Dovecot can use under full load (more than 640). Either grow the limit or change login_max_processes_count and max_mail_processes settings log_path: /Volumes/Home/FZ/Library/Logs/Dovecot/error.log info_log_path: /Volumes/Home/FZ/Library/Logs/Dovecot/info.log listen: localhost:10143 ssl_disable: yes disable_plaintext_auth: no login_dir: /Volumes/Home/FZ/sw/var/run/dovecot/login login_executable: /Volumes/Home/FZ/sw/libexec/dovecot/imap-login login_user: fz login_chroot: no mail_location: maildir:~/Library/Maildir auth default: user: fz passdb: driver: passwd-file args: /Volumes/Home/FZ/sw/etc/dovecot.passwd userdb: driver: passwd mini:~ fz$