[Dovecot] about filtering and dovecot

[Nigel Metheringham]

On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 14:19 +0200, Bram Mertens wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 12:18 +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> > On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 12:56 +0200, Bram Mertens wrote:
> > > Here's my wish-list:
> > > 1) download mail from my ISP's POP3-server
> > 
> > thats probably fetchmail (spit).
> 
> Maybe I'm not getting some slang but I get the impression you'd prefer
> something else. If so why and what? I am by no means married to
> fetchmail, if there's another tool that will suit my needs and that has
> some advantages of fetchmail I'd like to here about it.

I've just looked at fetchmail again having managed to avoid it for ages.
Its obscure, it loses mail, it does truely stupid things (for example
the way it treats the IDLE extension), it doesn't check return codes
correctly from IMAP (meaning I'm currently getting mail duplicated).  At
present I don't know of a good alternative, although someone must have
written one considering how crap fetchmail is.

The bit that really scares me is that fetchmail is considered a poster
child for the whole open source gun toting community.  Umm... that last
part was me letting my annoyances get away with me...

I'll now stop the flamefest.


[...snip...]
> Again this is probably off-topic but if e-mail arrives at an ISP's
> POP3-server is there a way to reject mail at SMTP time? From what I'v
> gathered so far this is only possible when you have your own mail-server
> (and your own webdomain).

Basically yes.  However you can set your mail server up as though it is
directly listening on the internet and receiving your external mail
directly, but in reality its getting stuff from fetchmail (or a better
alternative).  If you do this and reject spam at SMTP time you may have
problems (for example in my case the machine I was forwarding it to does
sender address verification - giving rejections to the recipients in
this case[*] - that makes fetchmail barf).

> Aha, first page I opened on the wiki (which I must admit escaped my
> attention until I started looking for it) answers one of my questions:
> all folders are subfolders of the INBOX. That's probably why there's no
> need to reconfigure dovecot.

Thats how they appear, and are implemented in Maildir setups.  I have
never tried to use it with mbox so don't want to make wild guesses here.
However the folders (mbox files) will need to be somewhere in your home
directory, and will (probably) be mapped in IMAP to appear under INBOX.

[...snip...]
[7 is about storing outgoing mail]
> > 7 is a case of having your sent folder set as an imap folder - easy in
> > evolution but needs setting up on your client.
> 
> I'm sorry I don't understand, I consider evolution to be the client...

SOrry - yes evolution is a client.  As is kmail, mutt.... any of these
will need to be configured (or may have as default configuration) to
save their sent mail on the imap server.

> Thanks Nigel, I'll subscribe to the exim list since your answers have
> given me hope that I'm on the right track!

OK, although I am an exim developer etc, I think in this case your
interests would be best served by using procmail as an MDA of fetchmail
(or similar), doing spam scanning, virus scanning and filtering from
within that.  Pushing stuff through the MTA here is not really gaining
you much and probably making things more complex especially as you
really need to tune the MTA config to make sure you don't generate
strange bounce messages when things go wrong.

Not that I'm saying being on the exim lists are a bad thing :-)  I spend
far too much of my time looking after them.

	Nigel.

-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]