[SLE] IMAP HowTo (was re: POP Mail HOWTO?)

24 Jul 2006

      Having read what both Anders and Joanne had to 
say about setting up a simple mail server at 
home, I... um... flipped a coin, and went with 
Anders' version. So I followed the summary, 
as ammended in the follow-up message.

He was specific about his procedure being 
intended for a fresh system with no previous 
mail-related config.  So... yes... I reformatted 
and re-installed SUSE 10.1. Blew away everything, 
including /home - the only untouched partition 
was /data.   I restarted several times while the 
installer/updater seemed to be working around the 
Online Update problems that plagued the early 
days of the release, and I appear to have gotten 
all the necessary updates installed. Then I tackled 
the mail setup following printouts of Anders' 
e-mails with the instructions.

I did as much as I could as root, running SuSEconfig 
every time I turned around. As part of that 
effort, I created a link to my /data partition, 
and (as emphasized by Anders) made very sure that 
the target directory had the same ownership and 
permissions as the original mail landing spot in /var.
Then I started everything and stood back and let 
it rip.  I had been piling up mail on my ISP for 
some weeks (still am, since I used the 'keep' option 
until this is working), so fetchmail went and got 
thousands of messages. 
I have no idea where they went, but it took more 
than half an hour to get them all, via ADSL, 
the first time. Thereafter, connections took 
a few seconds, so I'm assuming it was getting 
mail that hadn't already been retrieved in the 
first lengthy batch.

I started Thunderbird to connect to Cyrus on 
the same machine. I answered its initial questions 
with responses that made sense to me at the time. 
At first it wouldn't connect, so I tweaked saslauth 
config and tried again. Thunderbird prompted for 
my password and then made satisfied noises, but 
no mail appeared in my INBOX (in Thunderbird).  
I spent a few hours reading stuff in the Cyrus 
docs and didn't really find anything that I was 
sure I should be tweaking, so I tried something 
else. 

I figure that all the downloading activity meant 
I must have thousands of messages SOMEwhere, and 
I tried to find 'em. I know that Cyrus doesn't 
use /Maildir, but I read that it _does_ store 
messages as individual files, and uses databases 
to handle all the meta info. I looked every place 
I could imagine, on both /var and my /data partition, 
as well as in /home (just in case), to no avail. 
If I've got a load of downloaded mail somewhere, 
it's well hidden.

Meanwhile, I came into my office this morning 
and found dozens of bounce mails, from all the stuff 
that I'd sent/forwarded from office to home over the 
past several weeks. They looked like this:
****************************************************
Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

This is the Postfix program at host junkbox.OURHOUSE.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

			The Postfix program

 (expanded from ):
Host
    or domain name not found. Name service error for
    name=localhost.junkbox.OURHOUSE type=AAAA: Host not found
*************************************************************
Of course, I don't have a remote connection to fix anything 
at home, so it's going to be doing this to all my mailing 
lists and getting me disbarred, and possibly tarred and 
feathered.

My real e-mail address is kevinmcl-â-magma.ca, my ISP 
being magma.ca. 
"Junkbox" is the hostname of the machine on which 
I've been trying to configure this domestic server, 
and "OURHOUSE" is a made-up 'domain' that I inserted 
when it appeared that I had to insert something. 
I guess that would have been in postfix config (main.cf), 
but I'm miles away from that box right now, so I 
can't check.  
Elefino is the username on that computer.
I'm guessing that something, somewhere inserted 
"localhost" into the mix, because I never wrote 
that explicitly. Maybe it was a default that I 
didn't change in some config file, because it was 
not mentioned in Anders' instructions. Dunno. 
I thought I read (from Anders) that I should be 
able to follow his instructions as written to get 
a working IMAP server, and that if I foolishly 
_wanted_ to do additional config-file tweaking, 
that was 'beyond the scope' and asking for trouble. 

So, does this mean that my mail never did come in?
That 30-to-40 minutes of modem activity and disk 
churning was for naught? 
Does it mean that the mail is all lying on my 
hard disk somewhere but Cyrus-IMAP didn't accept 
it? 
Does it mean that Cyrus-IMAP is not working?
Or that Cyrus-IMAP has my mail, but isn't showing 
it to me (via Thunderbird) and isn't acknowledging 
to Postfix?

At least, when I left this morning, there was no 
disk or modem activity, so I'll take comfort in 
the possibility that maybe I didn't also configure 
an open spam relay while goofing up everything else...

Kevin (unserved, still)

PS:  Anders, hope your move to Germany went 
smoothly.

PPS: Once all this was working, I was going to set up 
another address to be <postmaster>.

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John Andersen

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John Andersen

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Michael James

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John Andersen

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