[Dovecot] Mobile phone client - first access
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning! With my first post to the list, may I begin by saying how impressed I have been by Dovecot's performance on our Debian server. We've configured it to run with Exim and Fetchmail, using Dovecot to manage professional and domestic emails for a small home office, serving a number of Windows and Linux clients both on the internal network and, when working overseas, via SSH tunnels back to the Debian server. Dovecot's performance has been, simply, rock-solid; a very impressive piece of work by Timo and all those supporting him.
My ordinary mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson C510 - includes an email client with IMAP capability (and none, TLS, or SSL encryption). Configured to access our server across the mobile carrier's network, the results surprised me; they were not what I expected.
The first surprise was, it worked.
More seriously, the messages it retrieved were not what I expected; the phone received around 58 messages, but from the 'inbox', the 'junk' box, and a couple from a 'project' box. I had expected to only retrieve the messages that were in the 'inbox'. How does Dovecot 'decide' what messages to give the phone client? [I think I may have the wrong 'mental model' of what should have happened, and would appreciate being put right.] Is it possible to configure Dovecot to only serve specific boxes? The mobile phone client is extremely simple - it does not have the facility to 'browse' the folders, it only has an inbox, sentbox, etc; I have wondered whether there might be a 'jar' email client that is richer, and which might help - I will look for something anyway.
But I was impressed that my mobile phone could check our home and office email while offsite; if I can get that working it will save having to fire up the laptop at each opportunity.
Thanks very much for reading this far, and, also, thanks everyone who takes the time to contribute to the list,
regards, Ron
On 2010-08-20 10:33:57 +0100, Ron Leach wrote:
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:33:57 +0100 From: Ron Leach ronleach@tesco.net Subject: [Dovecot] Mobile phone client - first access To: dovecot@dovecot.org
Ladies and gentlemen, good morning! With my first post to the list, may I begin by saying how impressed I have been by Dovecot's performance on our Debian server. We've configured it to run with Exim and Fetchmail, using Dovecot to manage professional and domestic emails for a small home office, serving a number of Windows and Linux clients both on the internal network and, when working overseas, via SSH tunnels back to the Debian server. Dovecot's performance has been, simply, rock-solid; a very impressive piece of work by Timo and all those supporting him.
My ordinary mobile phone - a Sony Ericsson C510 - includes an email client with IMAP capability (and none, TLS, or SSL encryption). Configured to access our server across the mobile carrier's network, the results surprised me; they were not what I expected.
The first surprise was, it worked.
More seriously, the messages it retrieved were not what I expected; the phone received around 58 messages, but from the 'inbox', the 'junk' box, and a couple from a 'project' box. I had expected to only retrieve the messages that were in the 'inbox'. How does Dovecot 'decide' what messages to give the phone client? [I think I may have the wrong 'mental model' of what should have happened, and would appreciate being put right.] Is it possible to configure Dovecot to only serve specific boxes? The mobile phone client is extremely simple - it does not have the facility to 'browse' the folders, it only has an inbox, sentbox, etc; I have wondered whether there might be a 'jar' email client that is richer, and which might help - I will look for something anyway.
But I was impressed that my mobile phone could check our home and office email while offsite; if I can get that working it will save having to fire up the laptop at each opportunity.
Thanks very much for reading this far, and, also, thanks everyone who takes the time to contribute to the list,
your phone decides.
you should check if the software on the phone honors the server side subscription list or has a local one.
darix-- openSUSE - SUSE Linux is my linux openSUSE is good for you www.opensuse.org
the messages it retrieved were not what I expected; the phone received around 58 messages, but from the 'inbox', the 'junk' box, and a couple from a 'project' box. I had expected to only retrieve the messages that were in the 'inbox'. How does Dovecot 'decide' what messages to give the phone client?
your phone decides.
In that case, the phone must have obtained, from Dovecot, the existence of 'junk' maildir, and 'project1' maildir, since messages were retrieved from those as well as from 'inbox'.
you should check if the software on the phone honors the server side subscription list or has a local one.
Thank you, darix, for this hint; I'll search around the SE sites for that sort of info. Though the phone retrieved *all* the messages from 'inbox', it only retrieved *today's* messages from 'junk' and 'project1' (which seems a sophisticatedly-calculating approach to deciding what to retrieve). The phone also has a (changeable) limit of 100 messages to retrieve, but only 58 were retrieved, so the message count was (presumably) not triggered. There don't seem to be any other settings, except for multiple usernames and passwords.
Is it possible to configure Dovecot to only serve specific boxes?
I guess not? We've got a second server. Its primary role is to back up the data stores. I wonder if we might run Fetchmail on that to set up an 'inbox'-only maildir store retrieved from Dovecot on the main mail server. So a copy of the inbox would always be on the SecondServer. Then, on the SecondServer, we might use Dovecot to 'serve' this 'inbox' with IMAP, and set the mobile phones to access Dovecot on the SecondServer instead of on the normal email server that we've used so far. Rather messy, though. The objective is, really, to keep track of incoming mail through the mobile and, maybe, type a quick acknowledgement before dealing substantively with anything later, back in the office.
regards, Ron
On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 12:40 +0100, Ron Leach wrote:
Is it possible to configure Dovecot to only serve specific boxes?
I guess not?
You could create e.g. "ron-mobile" named account and then in /home/ron-mobile/Maildir/ (or whatever) create symlinks to /home/ron/Maildir/ so that only INBOX is visible to ron-mobile.
Timo Sirainen wrote:
On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 12:40 +0100, Ron Leach wrote:
Is it possible to configure Dovecot to only serve specific boxes?
You could create e.g. "ron-mobile" named account and then in /home/ron-mobile/Maildir/ (or whatever) create symlinks to /home/ron/Maildir/ so that only INBOX is visible to ron-mobile.
Oh, that is neat. In fact I could do a link to both the 'work' inbox, and a link to the 'home' inbox, so that I can check both work and home email through my ordinary mobile phone while offsite. Brilliant.
As I understand it, symlinking the ron-mobile Maildir to the ron Maildir will *only* fetch the *messages* in the ron Maildir (actually, it's the work INBOX I'll be using, which has a lot of sub Maildirs), and Dovecot won't list all the subordinate Maildirs (eg .Project1, .Project2, etc) that are in the top Maildir directory?
I'll read up on symlinks, now, because I've never created one. Apologies if the question above is trivial and the answer would have been clear if I had already read up on them.
regards, Ron
On 20.8.2010, at 20.43, Ron Leach wrote:
As I understand it, symlinking the ron-mobile Maildir to the ron Maildir will *only* fetch the *messages* in the ron Maildir (actually, it's the work INBOX I'll be using, which has a lot of sub Maildirs), and Dovecot won't list all the subordinate Maildirs (eg .Project1, .Project2, etc) that are in the top Maildir directory?
Depends on how you symlink it. For example:
cd /home/ron-mobile ln -s /home/ron/Maildir .
Now /home/ron/ and /home/ron-mobile/ are identical, so everything will be again fetched. But then you could also do:
cd /home/ron-mobile/Maildir ln -s /home/ron/Maildir .ron-inbox
Now you have a folder called "ron-inbox" that contains the INBOX messages. And finally if you want to preserve the INBOX as INBOX without changing the name:
cd /home/ron-mobile/Maildir ln -s /home/ron/Maildir/cur . ln -s /home/ron/Maildir/new . ln -s /home/ron/Maildir/tmp .
participants (3)
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Marcus Rueckert
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Ron Leach
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Timo Sirainen