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

Michael Steinbeck-Reeves michael at steinbeck-reeves.uk.com
Thu Apr 30 13:22:17 EEST 2009


> Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:27:46 +0200
> From: Andreas Ntaflos <daff at dword.org>
> Subject: Re: [Dovecot] How do I get my mail from fetchmail into
> 	dovecot?
> > 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.

Thanks, I have changed over and your diagrams made it much more obvious
what is actually going on.

> 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.

That seems simple - thanks.

Do I just put a list of retrievers, one after the other with a single
destination following that and let dovecot sort out the destinations?

The only thing I don't understand and can't find/understand in the
documentation is how to tell the LDA where to put my e-mails. I have
mails to several addresses mixed up in several POP3 boxes and need to
sort them out and deliver them based on the target address. e.g.
michael at domain1 and michael at domain2 go to my box etc. I can't see where
I identify the addresses and allocate the appropriate storage area.

Thanks,

Michael





More information about the dovecot mailing list