On 07/26/2014 08:35 PM, Damon Register wrote:
I think I am confusing two different parts of mail handling. Mr. Rankin's post on this subject helps me with understanding those parts.
Mr. Rankin was my father -- david is fine.
When I was referring to sendmail, I am thinking of the system mail spool and this seems to fit into the MTA category that Mr. Rankin mentioned. This is what I would be retrieving with alpine, right?
Yes, Alpine servers the same function as Thunderbird. It is a MUA (mail user agent). It just gets the stuff from the spool and then (let's you read it) and separates it into the folders, etc.. in ~/Mail
Before I installed dovecot and attempted to configure/run, there were just two files in /home/userx/Mail. these were saved-messages and sent-mail. Mr. Ranking helped me understand that I should also look at /var/spool/mail where I found userx's inbox
Yep, you are getting it. Now, here is another issue to be aware of. Different MUA (Alpine/Thunderbird) will use different names for your standard folders under ~/Mail. One might use 'sent' for sent messages, the other might use 'sent-items', etc.. (Same issue for 'trash', 'drafts', etc..) This is even more of an issue when you access your mail over the internet from your smart phone. It may use a different set of names as well. So the way you handle this is you decide what you want your 'sent', 'trash', 'drafts', etc. to be called. (generally just use whatever the first MUA creates for you) Then when you access mail with another device or mailer, check your ~/Mail folder again to see what was newly created. What you will then want to do is to create a softlink to your original file with the new name to insure all your 'sent', 'drafts', 'trash', etc.. are all collected in the same place and not scattered all over ~/Mail under different names. *this makes all you 'sent' messages, etc.. available REGARDLESS of which device or package you are using to read you mail at any one time. For example, if Alpine creates: ~/Mail/sent-mail and you send a message with your smart phone and find a new ~/Mail/Sent\ Messages you need to (save if needed) then delete the ~/Mail/Sent\ Messages file and then cd ~/Mail ln -s sent-mail Sent\ Messages to create a softlink named "Sent Messages" that points to sent-mail. Then all sent messages will go in sent-mail even if sent from your smart phone.
After I started dovecot, see there are some files and folders that were written to /home/userx/Mail. These files appear to me to be independent from the system mail spool.
They are. Generally you will get ~/Mail/.subscriptions file and a ~/Mail/.imap folder created in ~/Mail. The .subscriptions file just tell dovecot which folders (mboxes) you want to see in your MUA and the .imap dir just contains the indexes for each of your mboxes.
What I am trying to say is that now that I have dovecot, I can use alpine and send a message from userz to userx, and userx can see that message using alpine. If userx looks at his dovecot server mail, he will not see that message from userz.
Right. Each users mail is private.
In the past, I used qpopper to allow pop3 retrieval of those system mail spool messages? Why? My favorite mail software has been Thunderbird since it was Netscape. I liked the convenience of being able to see my ISP e-mail such as this as well as the local system mail spool messages from the same client. qpopper was my interface between the system mail and Thunderbird.
I have used dovecot/thunderbird since it was Netscape as well. Dovecot is the way to go, hands down.
You have to choose, however, where will dovecot store that email. Rather, it is not dovecot, but sendmail or postfix or procmail which does it. I don't follow.
No. Your system chooses where the mail spool is located. The MTA is configured to deliver mail that the system receives to the mail spool (sometimes called the "system inbox") wherever that happens to be. Your mail retrieval software (Dovecot) is configured to allow the user to access his mail in the mail spool (wherever that happens to be) And finally your MUA determines where (and it what format) to store it in your local store under ~/Mail (or whatever it happens to be). So what Carlos was saying, is that if you are running Alpine/Thunderbird on the same machine that contains the mail spool (i.e. you are not accessing your mail on some remote host), then there is no reason to have copies of your mail saved in ~/Mail. Since in that case ~/Mail and /var/spool/mail are on the same computer. (you will still have all the indexes/folders created under ~/Mail, there is just no need to "sync messages" because the mail spool is on the same box as your local store. Isn't it fun..... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org