On Wednesday 29 April 2009 15:46:05 Michael Steinbeck-Reeves wrote:

I have dovecot (with squirrel mail etc.) running without any problems but cannot understand how to get e-mail from a pop server into dovecot. I have fetchmail configured to pick up the mail from the pop3 server but don't understand how to get it from there into my dovecot mbox structure.

My advice: forget Fetchmail and use Getmail [1] instead. Getmail does everything Fetchmail does, only better. The documentation is excellent, the author (and mailinglist) very responsive should you run into problems you can't seem to solve on your own and I believe there exist a number of HOWTOs on how to setup Getmail with Dovecot. Not that it's very difficult, though.

I myself have such a "mail hamster" setup running just fine, which I mentioned a few weeks ago on this list [2]. You might find that post helpful.

The general idea is to use Getmail to poll the remote mail servers (I poll two POP servers and three IMAP-SSL servers), retrieve messages, optionally scan them for viruses and spam and then hand them over to your local Dovecot server using Dovecot's LDA "deliver". See [3] for a nice picture :) If you skip virus and spam scanning the configuration for a single remote IMAP server boils down to:

~/.getmail/remote_imap_server.rc:

[options] verbose = 0 read_all = false

[retriever] type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever server = address_of_remote_imap_server username = username_on_remote_server password = password_on_remote_server

[destination] type = MDA_external path = /usr/local/libexec/dovecot/deliver

The destination part tells getmail to call the "deliver" program (without any commandline options) with the retrieved message. Dovecot then does the rest.

HTH

Andreas

[1] http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/ [2] http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/2009-March/038074.html [3] http://img394.imageshack.us/img394/6148/mailhamster.png

Andreas Ntaflos Vienna, Austria

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