[Dovecot] How do I get my mail from fetchmail into dovecot?

[Andreas Ntaflos]

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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