[Dovecot] dbus support in dovecot?

Gene Heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Thu Jul 25 22:45:17 EEST 2013


On Thursday 25 July 2013 15:13:58 Stan Hoeppner did opine:

> On 7/25/2013 8:02 AM, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Thursday 25 July 2013 08:38:33 Steffen Kaiser did opine:
> >> there might be a misunderstanding here, Dovecot is an IMAP and POP3
> >> server. It ships tools that replicate messages from other Dovecot
> >> servers and in limits from other IMAP servers.
> >> 
> >> If you intend to POP other servers, copy their messages to one local
> >> host and view your messages "offline", I would keep fetchmail and Co.
> > 
> > That is the gist of what I have in mind.
> > 
> > Dovecot can I assume, watch the mailfiles in /var/spool/mail?
> 
> It can be configured to do so.  Or it can be configured to directly
> receive the mail via pipe from Postfix using LDA or LMTP, and then write
> it to /var/spool/mail in mbox format, or to user maildirs.
> 
> > My present method of using inotifywait wrapped in a bash script to
> > tell kmail to go get the new mail via a dbus message has worked well
> > for years. But with no previous experience with imap, I haven't a
> > clue how new mail arrival is handled in that sort of a setup.
> 
> Instant notification is built into IMAP4 w/the IDLE command.  See:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE
> 
> >> Or when it suits more, maybe imapsync. If you keep that chain any
> >> local mailer should be able to pick up the locally spooled messages.
> >> Maybe you could switch to Maildir as backend, in order to minimizes
> >> locking issues. Of course, you could serve that local mail spool
> >> with Dovecot to other IMAP or POP3 clients.
> > 
> > Already "pigeonhole"d or "sieve"d into the usual folder format?  Once
> > I get the sorting filter rules re manufactured, that would be great!
> 
> Not sure what you mean by "the usual folder format".  Sieve will sort
> into your IMAP folders.  These may or may not have a 1:1 correlation to
> filesystem folders.  Depends on the mailbox storage format you choose.

Where the email client see's the incoming email already sorted into what 
are subdirs, in the case of kmail, in the users $HOME/Mail dir.  I see 
claws can see the directory tree kmail has built, but cannot see the kmail 
messages because it doesn't look into kde-pim/cur.  Everything I have 
pulled from /var/spool/mail/gene with clawsmail has been put as individual 
numbered files, all in the kmail 'inbox'.

Where I am the only user here, that is not a problem, but it seems to me 
this individual directory for each mailing list, really should be another 
tree in /var/mail, but then somehow is it shared such that if I am at one 
of the machines that run my cnc milling machine or cnc lathe, 150 feet of 
cat5 & and an 8 port switch, so that what I see from one of those machines 
is identical to what I would see on this machine?
 
> >> You also could fetchmail the remote hosts and inject them into a
> >> local Dovecot server via LMTP, you can then try to run clamav and
> >> spamd from Sieve and you have the other Sieve-capabilities as well.

There ought to be a tut someplace for this, but in my googling for such, 
nothing has popped up. And wiki2 doesn't seem to get into adequate 'depth', 
its TBT, closer to a sales pitch than a users howto manual, or I'm not 
hitting the right links in my 10,000 monkeys like performance. ;)

> > LTMP is a new acronym to me.  Sorry. Synonymous to an MTA? 
> > Effectively replacing procmail with dovecot and sieve but still using
> > spamd and clamav?
> 
> LMTP, Local Mail Transport protocol, is a subset of SMTP.  It can be
> used locally or over the wire.  With the Dovecot LMTP implementation,
> Sieve takes action on messages when they arrive, and Dovecot's indexes
> are updated appropriately as well.  I'm not sure about spamd and clamav
> integration here.  The vast majority of people using Dovecot deliver the
> mail via Postfix with LDA or LMTP, and do their AS/AV filtering in
> Postfix, where SPamassassin and clamav are but two of many possible
> packages.  Many people run both of these via amavisd-new.

Something else to muddy the waters it seems, but I've not actually looked 
at it either.  Possibly my bad.
 
> > Are there any better tutorials than Steve Litt's?, which seem to be
> > getting a tad dated now.
> 
> I'm not familiar with these tutorials.

He wrote an "escape from kmail' tutorial, 33 pages IIRC, but its a couple 
years old now. 

> What I would suggest Gene, if possible, is using the 'standard'
> Postfit/Dovecot config, doing AS/AV in Postfix, have an upstream system
> gather the mail from your various POP mailboxes and deliver them to an
> address hosted by Postfix via SMTP.  In other words, push all of the non
> standard IMAP server methodology away from, upstream of, your Dovecot
> installation.  I'd think one of the mailbox collation services could do
> this.  I.e.  POP a dozen mailboxes and forward all the mail to a single
> SMTP address.  Maybe fetchmail can do this.  I've never used it.

I actually do that now, popping 3 servers with fetchmail, 2 of which are 
actually google-mail since my ISP defaulted on keeping a server that 
actually worked going so they've contracted for gmail now, and one that I 
refused to use because they had a 5 char maximum passwd, something J-T-R 
can find in just a few seconds.  I like long passwds for any external 
access.
 
> You may want to ask about this as OT on SDLU.  Hundreds of years of
> combined mail experience there.

I have been reading SDLU for quite some time.  The combined level of 
expertise, and the variety of opinions there are amazing.

However, I would really like to start with some in depth docs, docs I am 
not having a lot of luck finding.  But I am not, as you can see, too 
bashful to go ask the source. ;)

Thank you Stan.

Cheers, Gene
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