mlist@safenet-inc.com wrote:
Summary: I'm doing a lot of backtracking in my simple little quest, because the task keeps getting interrupted for weeks at a stretch. Anyway, I'm still trying to set up a simple mail server in my tiny home network. I have the following picture in my head:
- fetchmail grabs mail from my ISP's POP3 server and hands it off to...
- some interim mail handling service/app and
- magic happens, before
- an imap server catches and holds that mail and serves it out to my clients on a couple of other computers at my house.
I have not gotten past stage 1 yet.
Yesterday, I ran one pass of fetchmail (with --keep) just to see what would happen. What happened is that 1545 messages came in, over a period of several minutes and went.... somewhere...
I figure that they are on my hard disk somewhere in either MBOX format or maildir format (or maybe even mailboxes.db, but I doubt it) and:
a) I don't know where they went.
man fetchmail: As each message is retrieved fetchmail normally delivers it via SMTP to port 25 on the machine it is running on (localhost), just as though it were being passed in over a normal TCP/IP link. The mail will then be delivered locally via your system's MDA (Mail Delivery Agent, usually sendâ mail(8) but your system may use a different one such as smail, mmdf, exim, or qmail). All the delivery-control mechanisms (such as .forward files) normally available through your system MDA and local delivery agents will therefore work automatically. If no port 25 listener is available, but your fetchmail configuration was told about a reliable local MDA, it will use that MDA for local delivery instead. At build time, fetchmail normally looks for executable procmail(1) and sendmail(1) binaries. Is postfix running? Output of "rcpostfix status" If so, output of "mailq"? If no mails are in the queue, look in /var/spoo/mail/username If you can't find it, send output of "postconf -n". Is cyrus running? Output of "rccyrus status" have you set up mailboxes with cyradm?
b) I don't know what format.
QUESTION: What's the most straightforward way to find all that mail (before it gets mysteriously flushed or something), so I can begin to piece together how it's being handled now and what to do to have it handled the way I need?
See above.
QUESTION 2: With only a few users on a few machines, and maybe a couple of hundred thousand messages stored for IMAP serving, is my best server option:
- plain, vanilla imap - courier-imap - Cyrus-imap
Both cyrus and courier are robust and don't use too much resources. I have Cyrus running on an old Dual-PIII-500 server, and it handles users with more than 100.000 mails without problems.
I understand that each of these also has preferred mailbox formats, so where in the mail trail does the incoming mail get mushed into one or another format? It seems to come from the ISP as single files, so I ASSume that the "conversion" to MBOX or maildir or [other option?] takes place either in fetchmail in the next app that handles the mail (procmail? sendmail? postfix?) before it reaches the resting place that imap will use.
Fetchmail -> Postfix ( -> contentfilter SA/Antivirus -> Postfix) -> Imapserver That is the usual way to process Mails with fetchmail.
As for choosing a flavor of IMAP, I just don't know. I don't really want to get into setting up additional authentication databases (sasl? LDAP? other?), but if that would be simpler than the PAM or shadow requirements... well maybe...
PAM is the most simple setup.
Last night, I had 22 browser windows open with a variety of Howtos and FAQs (many contradicting each other) for fetchmail, imap, Cyrus-imap, courier-imap, procmail, postfix, sendmail, qmail (no, I don't think I have qmail installed, but...). Basically I have an overload of info and an underload of knowledge or direction. I gave up and went to bed a 2:30 ... and got up at 5:30... oi!
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