[opensuse] replacing qpopper with dovecot

I have just installed SuSE 13.1 and I wanted to install qpopper since that is what I was using to make local sendmail available to Thunderbird (pop3). I found that qpopper was missing from the repository and with a little google work, I found one post that asked about qpopper for 13.1. One person suggested using dovecot so I thought I would give it a try. Installing was easy and I thought running might be too. I started the service through yast, services manager. It seemed that dovecot didn't stay running so as suggested in dovecot manual, I looked at /var/log/mail. I saw that it failed on detection of the mail folder for my username. The manual had some info about that and suggested editing the dovecot.conf file. I did and now dovecot seems to be working and I can even connect from Thunderbird. It appears however that I might not understand very well how to get my goal for dovecot. I see that dovecot works and Thunderbird connects but I see that dovecot has created its own set of mail files and folders in the mail dir that seem to be parallel to the sendmail files but not connected with the sendmail files. Can anyone tell me how to get dovecot to do what I used to do with qpopper? I want dovecot to repackage sendmail messages for use by Thunderbird (or any other pop3 client). Damon Register -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/26/2014 06:20 PM, Damon Register wrote:
I have just installed SuSE 13.1 and I wanted to install qpopper since that is what I was using to make local sendmail available to Thunderbird (pop3). I found that qpopper was missing from the repository and with a little google work, I found one post that asked about qpopper for 13.1. One person suggested using dovecot so I thought I would give it a try.
Like all amazingly capable software, dovecot is amazingly configurable to achieve that capability. In fact its a "learning experience" in its won right. PLEASE: do not get confused when you visit the wiki between the stuff about V1 and the stuff about V2. And please do not try upgrading from V1 to V2. Their config are quite different.
Installing was easy and I thought running might be too. I started the service through yast, services manager.
Ah, not what I did not what what I would advise. I don't think dovecot is yast-friendly. It *is* very CLI friendly and very VIM friendly. Oh, and its not AppArmour friendly out of the box. You can see that in the logs. There's a tool you can run that parses the logs and updates apparmor. You'll need to run it and dovecot a couple or three times to get it all sorted out. My mail arrangement with the local mail repository, spamassassin processing, procmail processing, sanitisation and more ends up with quite a complex mail store and needs a heavily customized Dovecot config.
It seemed that dovecot didn't stay running so as suggested in dovecot manual, I looked at /var/log/mail. I saw that it failed on detection of the mail folder for my username. The manual had some info about that and suggested editing the dovecot.conf file. I did and now dovecot seems to be working and I can even connect from Thunderbird.
Good.
It appears however that I might not understand very well how to get my goal for dovecot. I see that dovecot works and Thunderbird connects but I see that dovecot has created its own set of mail files and folders in the mail dir that seem to be parallel to the sendmail files but not connected with the sendmail files.
Correct. Don't worry about them. Unless you go to great lengths to get dovecot to do otherwise it 'manages" the repository for you. Those 'great lengths" might, for example, involve having dovecot use a SQL or LDAP database to keep this auxiliary information in. (On re-reading this before sending I realise you may be talking about something different from what I am interpreting. Can you detail this please: what files? What do you mean by 'sendmail' files?) If this was all on a remote IMAP server you really wouldn't care, would you? Dovecot is doing its won indexing and 'bookmarking'. Some of this only comes alive when you tell Thunderbird to use the removte index, which is great when you are accessing the indexes on a off site server. Dovecot has the hooks for the plucine full text indexing. That is great, much better than having T'Bird down load each message and scan it when you are searching "Body". Dovecot indexes each message as it arrives so the overhead of the full text search doesn't hit you when you do it, as with T'Bird alone.
Can anyone tell me how to get dovecot to do what I used to do with qpopper? I want dovecot to repackage sendmail messages for use by Thunderbird (or any other pop3 client).
What do you mean by 'repackage'? You may gather from the above that Dovecot works best in IMPA mode. Perhaps what you need to do is tell us what your configuration is. Mine is, among others, to use fetchmail to read in the mail from various ISPs via POP# and pipe it though procmail, spamassassin and procmail again into various repositories that Dovecot knows about. My T'Bird then access my local repositories via IMAP talking to Dovecot. I am aware that some people make use of Postfix in that chain and other variations. What are YOU doing to get the mail to where your Dovecot is accessing it? -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/26/2014 05:48 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Ah, not what I did not what what I would advise.
I don't think dovecot is yast-friendly. It*is* very CLI friendly and very VIM friendly.
+1 While yast is capable, when it comes to configuring server applications, get a howto or wiki up in your browser and open the config file in a *text-editor*. That is the way Linux was designed to work. You will learn how your application works and what configuration directives make it work the way you need it to work. While there are graphical tools out there, there is no replacement for understanding your applications configuration. Using "widgets" to configure server applications may make it work, but will never tailor it to your needs like you can by direct interaction with the config. -- 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

On 2014-07-27 01:18, David C. Rankin wrote:
On 07/26/2014 05:48 PM, Anton Aylward wrote:
Ah, not what I did not what what I would advise.
I don't think dovecot is yast-friendly. It*is* very CLI friendly and very VIM friendly.
+1
While yast is capable, when it comes to configuring server applications, get a howto or wiki up in your browser and open the config file in a *text-editor*.
YaST only starts dovecot, it does not configure it. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)

On 2014-07-27 01:35, David C. Rankin wrote:
On 07/26/2014 06:26 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
YaST only starts dovecot, it does not configure it.
Well see -- there you go :)
:-) The YaST developers and contributors, now that YaST was migrated to ruby, could start creating new shiny modules to YaST, like one for better integration of mail. The module has not seen noticeable improvements in about a decade. So, one new module for dovecot, for instance. In fact, YaST has been losing modules. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)

On 07/26/2014 06:46 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
In fact, YaST has been losing modules.
No kidding.. I went nuts looking for the module to configure my touchpad that goes nuts in 13.1 and selects everything when my palm touches the sides -- even with syndaemon running. There used to be a very nice module in yast that would let you configure your input devices that would allow disabling (even sizing) the edge swipe function of the touchpad. I guess that disappeared with the changes to X. Bummer... Hopefully the new "flavor of the month" language for yast development will bring that back from the grave. -- 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

On 2014-07-27 00:20, Damon Register wrote:
It appears however that I might not understand very well how to get my goal for dovecot. I see that dovecot works and Thunderbird connects but I see that dovecot has created its own set of mail files and folders in the mail dir that seem to be parallel to the sendmail files but not connected with the sendmail files.
This is not clear. You could say what specific files, so that we get a better idea.
Can anyone tell me how to get dovecot to do what I used to do with qpopper? I want dovecot to repackage sendmail messages for use by Thunderbird (or any other pop3 client).
Actually, it is better to use dovecot via IMAP, not POP3, and let dovecot store email, not Thunderbird. In fact, being the same computer, you can tell Thunderbird /not/ to keep a local copy of email, it works very fast. This way you get the added advantage of being able to use, even simultaneously, several different email clients, if you wish. Or local computers. Dovecot is more efficient at storing email. Thunderbird will just keep a local index in its own folders. And dovecot will keep data, and also indexes. It is unavoidable that both keep indexes. 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. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" at Telcontar)

On 07/26/2014 07:36 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 2014-07-27 00:20, Damon Register wrote:
It appears however that I might not understand very well how to get
This is not clear. I agree with you and that is why I said what I did. I know to well that I am not clear because I don't have enough understanding of the subject. I guess if I did, then I wouldn't be asking the group for help :-)
You could say what specific files, so that we get a better idea. I think I am confusing two different parts of mail handling. Mr. Rankin's post on this subject helps me with understanding those parts.
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? 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 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. 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. 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.
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.
Damon Register -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-26 a las 21:35 -0400, Damon Register escribió:
On 07/26/2014 07:36 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
You could say what specific files, so that we get a better idea. I think I am confusing two different parts of mail handling. Mr. Rankin's post on this subject helps me with understanding those parts.
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?
Ok, I'll try to show another picture. I have to guess, because I have no idea how YOUR mail system is done, now. So I'll explain instead mine. · I use "fetchmail" to retrieve email from internet. · Fetchmail handles over that email to the local SMTP server, which by default on openSUSE, is postfix, but it could be sendmail. · The SMTP server, in my case, filters email with amavis-new, to purge out spam and viruses. · The SMTP server, in my case, "gives" the emails to the Local Delivery Agent (LDA), which in openSUSE is typically procmail. · This LDA sorts the emails according to rules, and puts each email on a different folder, decided by each user. If the user has no rules, email is left in /var/mail/USERNAME. · Thus, in my case, all email ends distributed in several folders like /home/USERNAME/Mail/whatever. · Dovecot is instructed to look in there: /etc/dovecot/local.conf: mail_location = mbox:~/Mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u Finally, I just tell Thunderbird to add a new account at "localhost" and it usually finds out what to do, automatically. I just disable "offline storage". For alpine: incoming-folders="something" {localhost/novalidate-cert/user=NAME}something, etc incoming-archive-folders={localhost/novalidate-cert/user=NAME}something {localhost/novalidate-cert/user=NAME}file/something, "inbox" {localhost/novalidate-cert/user=NAME}file/in_mbox, etc Or, you can just use fetchmail to put email somewhere (inside your home), and bypass postfix and the rest completely. Easier to understand, but no filtering nor sorting. If you have a real mail server on Internet, then the SMTP server would listen on Internet and accept emails that other SMTP servers would give to it on Internet. This is more complicated that it seems and has consequences. Notice that the role of Dovecot is just storing the emails that "something" pushes "somewhere". By itself it does no fetching or sorting. It is just a specialized storage service that you can access via network. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPUaPYACgkQja8UbcUWM1ynvAD/a2Kr6jd4Z3raGeQTaea1HP/h /bvzdedcA9Og6AKAZJoBAJzqy3CWtZ31pkc7F7h/+pxNZE+gG+VFa+rihoCLYiaJ =ataE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/26/2014 10:50 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2014-07-26 a las 21:35 -0400, Damon Register escribió:
On 07/26/2014 07:36 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
So I'll explain instead mine.
· I use "fetchmail" to retrieve email from internet.
+1 Damon, you don't explain how you fetch mail from your ISP(s). This is not something that Dovecot or qpopper would do. Their job is to dish up mail. It is possible that you have Thunderbird set up to access your ISPs and bring in mail. In that case the use of qpopper and dovecot seems irrelevant
· Fetchmail handles over that email to the local SMTP server, which by default on openSUSE, is postfix, but it could be sendmail. · The SMTP server, in my case, filters email with amavis-new, to purge out spam and viruses. · The SMTP server, in my case, "gives" the emails to the Local Delivery Agent (LDA), which in openSUSE is typically procmail.
Mine is slightly different. I've eliminated the need for the SMTP server. There is a simple way to use procmail to handle the spam and virus filtering. See appropriate documentation. I have no objection to the way Carlos describes. I just see no need for the added component. I do not run a SMTP server since my site is not listening on the net for email. There are no published MX records for the address of my cable connection to my ISP. YMMV.
· This LDA sorts the emails according to rules, and puts each email on a different folder, decided by each user. If the user has no rules, email is left in /var/mail/USERNAME.
+1 Well, sort of. Procmail is very powerful and as I keep saying, powerful and capable software needs capable configuration. The default is also configurable. My default is configured to be ~/Mail/INBOX
· Thus, in my case, all email ends distributed in several folders like /home/USERNAME/Mail/whatever.
+1 I have a tree there about 20 wide and about 8 deep in parts. It is managed by dovecot which dishes it up for Thunderbird using IMAP. Most of the files are mailx but some are maildir for historic reasons. There is also a parallel ARCHIVE tree which dovecot knows about too. The point is that "each to his own" and that dovecot, procmail (as well as the spam and AV tools) are very configurable. Damon, you are limiting us by your lack of details.
· Dovecot is instructed to look in there:
/etc/dovecot/local.conf:
mail_location = mbox:~/Mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u
Ahm, its a bit more than that. I have 4 'namespaces' defined.
Finally, I just tell Thunderbird to add a new account at "localhost" and it usually finds out what to do, automatically. I just disable "offline storage".
... Since mail is being brought in by 'fetchmail' and that makes sure it goes though the AV/Spam filters, something that does not happen if you have Thunderbird fetch the mail using its internal mechanisms pointed at the ISP.
Or, you can just use fetchmail to put email somewhere (inside your home), and bypass postfix and the rest completely. Easier to understand, but no filtering nor sorting.
That is a good starting point. Get that working then add the extra stuff you and I discussed. Diving in "our" deep end adds a lot of complexity that a will confuse a beginner.
Notice that the role of Dovecot is just storing the emails that "something" pushes "somewhere". By itself it does no fetching or sorting. It is just a specialized storage service that you can access via network.
+1 -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-27 a las 08:08 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/26/2014 10:50 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
· I use "fetchmail" to retrieve email from internet.
+1
Damon, you don't explain how you fetch mail from your ISP(s).
This is not something that Dovecot or qpopper would do. Their job is to dish up mail.
It is possible that you have Thunderbird set up to access your ISPs and bring in mail.
In that case the use of qpopper and dovecot seems irrelevant
Not really... You can use Thunderbird for the job of sending and getting, but you can use filters or manual management in Thunderbird to _move_ the emails that Thunderbird is storing, to the IMAP servert that dovecot provides. Not a bad method, IMHO.
Mine is slightly different. I've eliminated the need for the SMTP server. There is a simple way to use procmail to handle the spam and virus filtering. See appropriate documentation.
I have no objection to the way Carlos describes. I just see no need for the added component. I do not run a SMTP server since my site is not listening on the net for email. There are no published MX records for the address of my cable connection to my ISP. YMMV.
I have no published MX records, nor is my SMTP daemon listening on Internet. I do use it for sending - not direct, as a full postfix would do, but just to pick email from Alpine or Thunderbird and hands it over to my ISP - thus Thunderbird or Alpine returns inmediately. But that is not necesary at all.
· This LDA sorts the emails according to rules, and puts each email on a different folder, decided by each user. If the user has no rules, email is left in /var/mail/USERNAME.
+1
Well, sort of. Procmail is very powerful and as I keep saying, powerful and capable software needs capable configuration. The default is also configurable.
My default is configured to be ~/Mail/INBOX
You probably use "/etc/procmailrc"
Finally, I just tell Thunderbird to add a new account at "localhost" and it usually finds out what to do, automatically. I just disable "offline storage".
... Since mail is being brought in by 'fetchmail' and that makes sure it goes though the AV/Spam filters, something that does not happen if you have Thunderbird fetch the mail using its internal mechanisms pointed at the ISP.
...which actually, I also do. I can peek at email on the ISP directly with Thunderbird, answer, delete, etc. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPVO0kACgkQja8UbcUWM1zhFAD/aqYXH18pgjW0lNs0TRMXl9yd pEMH1BUXXNU4IMRjFn4BAJaHw9orWmAPjrIRHpW3xlYzaKG7Q51HG9Rcn/ujpRa5 =D0G6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/26/2014 09:35 PM, Damon Register wrote:
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.
It would help immensely if you told us what those files were. They might be, as I said, dovecot's own index files. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/26/2014 09:35 PM, Damon Register wrote:
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.
That seems non sequitor. "Retrieve" from mail spool? - that makes no sense. You shouldn't need anything to do that. If you set up T'Bird to read you ISP mail rather than have fetchmail download it to some local folder then you must have set up Thunderbird to fetch the mail from you your ISP, possibly using POP3. In which case it would store it in that ever repository you configured that, which is unlikely to be either /var/spool/mail or /home/<user>/Mail Thunderbird has its own embedded POP3 and IMAP4 handlers. You use of qpooper as you describe makes no sense. Please 1. What are the names of the dovecot files that have you perplexed? 2. How is Thunderbrd configured? -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/27/14 13:42, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/26/2014 09:35 PM, Damon Register wrote:
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.
That seems non sequitor. "Retrieve" from mail spool? - that makes no sense.
It's quite clear what he's doing. He knows how to configure Thunderbird to create a mail account, backed by a POP3 server. He does so for his ISP email. In previous releases, he accessed his system mail (in /var/spool/mail) by running qpopperd. So he could reuse that knowledge and only needed to add another account backed by a POP3 server (his own local server). With the demise of qpopperd his approach has gotten more difficult to realize.
You shouldn't need anything to do that.
You might be right in this specific case. I don't know Thunderbird, but probably one can create a mail account backed by "Unix Mailspool" or however Thunderbird calls this. Nevertheless, there are many other reasons why one might want to have a simple and pure download oriented interface to a mail spool. E.g., I use it for automated mail processing on a different server than the mail server. qpopperd+fetchmail delivered a light-weight ability to realize that service. It's a pity that I must implement the big jack-hammer Dovecot in my infrastructure for that small nail. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/27/2014 08:17 AM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
On 07/27/14 13:42, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/26/2014 09:35 PM, Damon Register wrote:
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.
That seems non sequitor. "Retrieve" from mail spool? - that makes no sense.
It's quite clear what he's doing.
By implication not by explicit statement ..
He knows how to configure Thunderbird to create a mail account, backed by a POP3 server. He does so for his ISP email.
I infer that. I'd like him to say that and say if that is all that Thunderbird is doing. I'd like him to confirm that he is using T'Bird to download from the ISP using POP to store the mail in whatever mailbox and folders T'Bird is set up for. I'd also like to know ho he's set up T'Bird for sending mail.
In previous releases, he accessed his system mail (in /var/spool/mail) by running qpopperd.
That makes no sense to me. On the one hand is the system is set up to deliver mail to /var/spool/mail rather than to ~/Mail then that is one case. If he's running Postfix to handle system mail then that could be configured, as I have done in many instances, to send system mail to a particular user at ~/Mail. This makes more sense in single user system where the single user doubles as the sysadmin & postmaster. See, for example, the Postfix 'aliases' file.
So he could reuse that knowledge and only needed to add another account backed by a POP3 server (his own local server). With the demise of qpopperd his approach has gotten more difficult to realize.
I don't get it. It was irrelevant in the first place. So he was using qpopper to make mail that was available on the system available to be downloaded to another part of the system, delivered by qpopper and downloaded by T'Bird accessing qpopper via POP3. It makes no sense to me. Why not just T'Bird at it in the first place? That's what I did here years ago, before I moved all my email off to a mail server hub and ran T'Bird on my workstation, accessing the mail hub via IMAP.
You shouldn't need anything to do that.
You might be right in this specific case.
its worked in the past here and on many other machines/sites I've installed it. If you are making use of mail hub on your LAN then yes, run an IMAP server on the mail hub for the workstations on the LAN. But if you have a single machine and have downloaded all the mail (or equivalent) the its all accessible as files on your machine. You don't need a server to dish it up, you can just point T'Bird at the files.
I don't know Thunderbird, but probably one can create a mail account backed by "Unix Mailspool" or however Thunderbird calls this.
You can create any number of accounts. You can point their working directories wherever you want. You can point what they use for the inbox, the 'sent', the 'junk', the 'draft' wherever, not just at files but at other counts. So you could set up a dozen different file, IMAP and POP account that all 'point' to the same 'inbox'. T'Bird is very capable, and that's before you start using the plugins.
Nevertheless, there are many other reasons why one might want to have a simple and pure download oriented interface to a mail spool.
Such as using 'fetchmail'.
E.g., I use it for automated mail processing on a different server than the mail server. qpopperd+fetchmail delivered a light-weight ability to realize that service. It's a pity that I must implement the big jack-hammer Dovecot in my infrastructure for that small nail.
My experience has always been that when the solution looks gargantuan then there's another KISS way to do it. Not knowing what you app is trying to _achieve_ I can't suggest an alternative. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-27 a las 09:14 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/27/2014 08:17 AM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
On 07/27/14 13:42, Anton Aylward wrote:
It's quite clear what he's doing.
By implication not by explicit statement ..
It is not clear to me at all.
In previous releases, he accessed his system mail (in /var/spool/mail) by running qpopperd.
That makes no sense to me.
Me neither. Let me see... what is wanted is just to "retrieve" the SYSTEM email, which sendmail or postfix normally puts in /var/mail/USERNAME? Just that? Then forget dovecot, forget qpopper. You do not need _anything_. When you hit "enter" on a terminal, a message will be printed saying that there is pending email. You can then just type "mail" and read it (not the traditional "mail", it is actually "mailx"). If using Alpine, it will just find out that location on its own and you can read those emails directly, with an interface way more powerful than with "mail". Thunderbird does not do it directly, but there are tricks. For instance, you could instruct procmail to move those emails to a place that Thunderbird reads. Thunderbird people talk of using "movemail". I have not tried that aproach. Dovecot also does it. It does not move mail, but it presents it to the client. If it owned by a different user, you can use "aliases" or the ".forward" file.
My experience has always been that when the solution looks gargantuan then there's another KISS way to do it.
Not knowing what you app is trying to _achieve_ I can't suggest an alternative.
Exactly... - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF0EAREIAAYFAlPVPqsACgkQja8UbcUWM1xJvgD4ir4uguBlcRkZR88P7UBQDzb9 KH/DbMi7fS3fUNJHmwD7BMWhhAl4I/dUAzaV3Xu9gQYM7m8g0SySco4LWBnTFPg= =O2sV -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/27/2014 02:02 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2014-07-27 a las 09:14 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/27/2014 08:17 AM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
On 07/27/14 13:42, Anton Aylward wrote:
It's quite clear what he's doing.
By implication not by explicit statement ..
It is not clear to me at all.
That's what I meant. Its not clearly and unambiguously stated. I'm having to figure it out by implication and from hints.
In previous releases, he accessed his system mail (in /var/spool/mail) by running qpopperd.
That makes no sense to me.
Me neither.
:-)
Let me see... what is wanted is just to "retrieve" the SYSTEM email, which sendmail or postfix normally puts in /var/mail/USERNAME? Just that?
Then forget dovecot, forget qpopper. You do not need _anything_.
Quite. Thunderbird is adequate.
My experience has always been that when the solution looks gargantuan then there's another KISS way to do it.
Not knowing what you app is trying to _achieve_ I can't suggest an alternative.
Exactly...
-- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/27/2014 09:14 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
I infer that. I'd like him to say that and say if that is all that Thunderbird is doing. I'd like him to confirm that he is using T'Bird to download from the ISP using POP to store the mail in whatever mailbox You just said it for me :-)
and folders T'Bird is set up for. I'd also like to know ho he's set up T'Bird for sending mail. I use my ISP's smtp server.
In previous releases, he accessed his system mail (in /var/spool/mail) by running qpopperd.
That makes no sense to me. I guess I don't have the right knowledge to explain in a way that would make sense. Fortunately Joachim understood me anyway.
On the one hand is the system is set up to deliver mail to /var/spool/mail rather than to ~/Mail then that is one case. Rather than? I am not sure I follow.
If he's running Postfix to handle system mail then that could be configured, as I have done in many instances, to send system mail to a I am not sure about that. What I do know is that I am using a default install of opensuse 13.1. As I was writing this, I figured it might help the discussion if I at least know what I am running. I went to Yast software management and learned that I am using postfix, not sendmail. I am sure that didn't help with the confusion. Sorry about that.
I don't get it. It was irrelevant in the first place. So he was using qpopper to make mail that was available on the system available to be downloaded to another part of the system, delivered by qpopper and downloaded by T'Bird accessing qpopper via POP3. I think I see a possible source of confusion. There are two different computers in this discussion.
Computer A is a Windows computer where I used Thunderbird to get/send e-mail from my ISP. Computer B in the basement is running SuSE and I used it mostly as a file server. I was interested in seeing the output of a cron job that I was running on the computer B without having to go downstairs to look at computer B. qpopper was running on computer B and I added another account to Thunderbird on computer A that points to computer B. qpopper on computer B just provided me the convenience of reading computer B's system mail while checking my regular ISP's e-mail on computer A
Why not just T'Bird at it in the first place? That's what I did here years ago, before I moved all my email off to a mail server hub and ran Are you telling me that Thunderbird can directly access computer B's system mail without having to repackage as pop3 the way I have been doing it? If so, that certainly would simplify what I am trying to do. Does it matter if Thunderbird is on Windows computer A while SuSE computer B has the system mail of interest?
its all accessible as files on your machine. You don't need a server to dish it up, you can just point T'Bird at the files. If so, I would like to know how.
Damon Register -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/27/2014 11:06 PM, Damon Register wrote:
If he's running Postfix to handle system mail then that could be configured, as I have done in many instances, to send system mail to a I am not sure about that. What I do know is that I am using a default install of opensuse 13.1. As I was writing this, I figured it might help the discussion if I at least know what I am running. I went to Yast software management and learned that I am using postfix, not sendmail. I am sure that didn't help with the confusion. Sorry about that.
The implication there is that you have installed postfix but not configured it. Given that, how would you expect it to behave? -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-27 a las 23:17 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/27/2014 11:06 PM, Damon Register wrote:
If he's running Postfix to handle system mail then that could be configured, as I have done in many instances, to send system mail to a I am not sure about that. What I do know is that I am using a default install of opensuse 13.1. As I was writing this, I figured it might help the discussion if I at least know what I am running. I went to Yast software management and learned that I am using postfix, not sendmail. I am sure that didn't help with the confusion. Sorry about that.
The implication there is that you have installed postfix but not configured it.
The default untouched configuration should work for system mail purposes. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPV/nUACgkQja8UbcUWM1yLVQD+KDtG8V11QSYv9ovAGa9wO9ZE C19sVxmZXNxmG/CvJBQA/0wvFmaEOpMEqxAxiouWYqD6nvTyLLujdJqQ0yEsmuZE =Dcv3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/27/2014 11:06 PM, Damon Register wrote:
I think I see a possible source of confusion. There are two different computers in this discussion.
Well thank you for FINALLY mentioning that! It changes everything.
Computer A is a Windows computer where I used Thunderbird to get/send e-mail from my ISP.
Computer B in the basement is running SuSE and I used it mostly as a file server.
I was interested in seeing the output of a cron job that I was running on the computer B without having to go downstairs to look at computer B. qpopper was running on computer B and I added another account to Thunderbird on computer A that points to computer B. qpopper on computer B just provided me the convenience of reading computer B's system mail while checking my regular ISP's e-mail on computer A
There's a specific solution which is very simple and a general solution which isn't. The simple but specific solution requires reading the man pages for cron. There it mentions that you can email the output of cron jobs to ANYONE. The page says: EXAMPLE CRON FILE # use /bin/sh to run commands, no matter what /etc/passwd says SHELL=/bin/sh # mail any output to `paul', no matter whose crontab this is MAILTO=paul That mailto could equally well be "dregister@clear.net" So long as the machine has a functioning Postix and that is configured to send to your isp as the relayhost you will get the cron job notifications in your regular email. No need for qpooper or dovecot. Its all about RTFM and configuration. The general but complicated solution is to run your file server as a mail hub, have dovecot running there so that all mail there is properly indexed and can be searched, and this capability applies for all user accounts. While you are about it you may as well run fetchmail and AV and SpamAssassin and have you Windows PC access the mail that has been brought in through those filters. It will be more effective security than you have with the Windows PC and Thunderbird by itself. You will also have it running ther and sorting and categorizing your mail and putting it in appropriate folders "automatically" so its all ready for you in the morning when you turn you Windows PC on and fire up Thunderbird. This is the sort of 'mail hub' arrangement that Carlos and I have nee talking about and which many of here run. Of course you may not need this general solution. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-27 a las 23:34 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/27/2014 11:06 PM, Damon Register wrote:
I think I see a possible source of confusion. There are two different computers in this discussion.
Well thank you for FINALLY mentioning that!
It changes everything.
It does.
Computer A is a Windows computer where I used Thunderbird to get/send e-mail from my ISP.
Computer B in the basement is running SuSE and I used it mostly as a file server.
I was interested in seeing the output of a cron job that I was running on the computer B without having to go downstairs to look at computer B. qpopper was running on computer B and I added another account to Thunderbird on computer A that points to computer B. qpopper on computer B just provided me the convenience of reading computer B's system mail while checking my regular ISP's e-mail on computer A
There's a specific solution which is very simple and a general solution which isn't.
Several. For instance, the faster method to setup (but the faster to use in the long run) is to install, in Windows, "putty". Use it to 'ssh' to the Linux computer on the basement, and then start "pine" to see the system mail, when wanted. Or looks at the logs, files, etc. There is a related tool (I don't have the name on the tip of my tongue, but I can find out) to, via ssh, access files, copy, etc, on the Linux machine from Windows, with an interface similar to Midnight Commander or Norton Commander. It would be possible to automate things in Windows and automatically retrieve logs.
The simple but specific solution requires reading the man pages for cron.
There it mentions that you can email the output of cron jobs to ANYONE.
True.
That mailto could equally well be "dregister@clear.net" So long as the machine has a functioning Postix and that is configured to send to your isp as the relayhost you will get the cron job notifications in your regular email.
Yes, but the configuration to postfix for doing this is not trivial. It is easy if you know how to do it. Instead, using uw-imap would have been my preferred solution in that situation (which he did not explain), very similar to qpopper, I would think. So using the current dovecot makes sense, except that dovecot is way more powerful and complex than any of those two older programs. If both machines were Linux machines, I would instead use an almost default postfix config to send mail from one machine to another (internally, not via internet). Actually, this is what I do with my "server". Well, you can setup an smtp server in Windows to receive that email; there are free ones out there. I tested one few years ago that I would reccomend, but I would have to locate my notes to find out the name.
No need for qpooper or dovecot. Its all about RTFM and configuration.
The general but complicated solution is to run your file server as a mail hub, have dovecot running there so that all mail there is properly indexed and can be searched, and this capability applies for all user accounts.
Yep. I would do that.
While you are about it you may as well run fetchmail and AV and SpamAssassin and have you Windows PC access the mail that has been brought in through those filters. It will be more effective security than you have with the Windows PC and Thunderbird by itself.
Yep. I would doo that - except when you go on the road or places where you want to also read your email. You would then need to make accessible your basement server from internet. It is possible, people do it.
You will also have it running ther and sorting and categorizing your mail and putting it in appropriate folders "automatically" so its all ready for you in the morning when you turn you Windows PC on and fire up Thunderbird.
True.
This is the sort of 'mail hub' arrangement that Carlos and I have nee talking about and which many of here run.
Yep. With many variations.
Of course you may not need this general solution.
Probably not. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPWBTYACgkQja8UbcUWM1zgUgD/fR+ZG1pSPkQga0lbRjTstL8x sGtMSM+hkDkhV0n/NB8A/R7k+AVmBnjAkeVLSNyaZZxzUASlO7Cd9aLRoe2sYdEy =1NHO -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Le 28/07/2014 10:09, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
If both machines were Linux machines, I would instead use an almost default postfix config to send mail from one machine to another (internally, not via internet). Actually, this is what I do with my "server".
are you sure this wont works in windows? (I never tried, I have no really running windows machine at home). I would be surprised if windows wont have some sort of internal message system (but I didn't manage windows since... wow... many years :-() jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/28/2014 04:25 AM, jdd wrote:
Le 28/07/2014 10:09, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
If both machines were Linux machines, I would instead use an almost default postfix config to send mail from one machine to another (internally, not via internet). Actually, this is what I do with my "server".
are you sure this wont works in windows? (I never tried, I have no really running windows machine at home). I would be surprised if windows wont have some sort of internal message system (but I didn't manage windows since... wow... many years :-()
Well he _could_ set things up so that cron uses syslog instead of email for notification ... A sort of 'push" rather than a "pull" notification. -- "What we have learned from others becomes our own through reflection". -- Ralph Emerson. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-28 a las 10:25 +0200, jdd escribió:
Le 28/07/2014 10:09, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
If both machines were Linux machines, I would instead use an almost default postfix config to send mail from one machine to another (internally, not via internet). Actually, this is what I do with my "server".
are you sure this wont works in windows? (I never tried, I have no really running windows machine at home). I would be surprised if windows wont have some sort of internal message system (but I didn't manage windows since... wow... many years :-()
But as it is, Linux cron generates emails, and Windows XP does not contain, out of the box, an SMTP server to receive/send email. YOu can add a third party one. You could do something in Linux, perhaps, so that cron instead of using email for comunications, uses syslog. And those messages can be sent to another machine. But again, XP does not have, out of the box, a syslog server to get messages from the outside and log them. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPW674ACgkQja8UbcUWM1z5+QD+I3FfKIuaj5O3KwA9ARu9TFZR iejDRX4VlwoVk9vt8fAA/jPftz0YJBxt0cNF/Qs5HVTUJCfMW+n9GuYnLmV5wckT =nPDl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/28/2014 08:33 PM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2014-07-28 a las 10:25 +0200, jdd escribió:
Le 28/07/2014 10:09, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
If both machines were Linux machines, I would instead use an almost default postfix config to send mail from one machine to another (internally, not via internet). Actually, this is what I do with my "server".
are you sure this wont works in windows? (I never tried, I have no really running windows machine at home). I would be surprised if windows wont have some sort of internal message system (but I didn't manage windows since... wow... many years :-()
But as it is, Linux cron generates emails, and Windows XP does not contain, out of the box, an SMTP server to receive/send email. YOu can add a third party one.
You could do something in Linux, perhaps, so that cron instead of using email for comunications, uses syslog. And those messages can be sent to another machine. But again, XP does not have, out of the box, a syslog server to get messages from the outside and log them.
One is tempted to ask at this point, given that Linux does run, out of the box, those things that Windows does have, and that you would have to pay extra for, just as you paid for Windows, whereas you didn't have t pay extra for them with Linux -- in fact you didn't have to pay for Linux in the first place, why Damon is running Windows and not Linux as his work-station, since not only would these facilities solve his problem, but Linux can run Thunderbird as well, in fact it runs Thunderbird very well! Enquiring minds .... -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/27/2014 11:06 PM, Damon Register wrote:
Why not just T'Bird at it in the first place? That's what I did here years ago, before I moved all my email off to a mail server hub and ran Are you telling me that Thunderbird can directly access computer B's system mail without having to repackage as pop3 the way I have been doing it? If so, that certainly would simplify what I am trying to do. Does it matter if Thunderbird is on Windows computer A while SuSE computer B has the system mail of interest?
Before this revelation I was assuming that you were talking about a single machine and all the files were on the same machine that Thunderbird was running on. You had not mentioned this upstairs/downstairs separation before. While there are techniques for file sharing they are also complicated compared to the one-liner in the crontab. On a personal note, I am a believer in what Marcus Ranum once termed "Artificial Ignorance". As in "I don't want to know". Most UNIX CLI commands are silent in that they tell you what you ask for. They aren't like VAX/VMS where every CLI command reposts it completion status to the terminal. Marcus gave the example of an umbrella which notified you of every raindrop it stopped. You don't need to know hen things are working properly. My POV is that I get enough mail as it is. I don't want more "as a matter of course". Does the content of the mail from the cron job matter? I'm reminded of a sales manager I knew who had a 2" high printout delivered every day. Only one line of that mattered to him but the way IT was set up it was all those hundreds of pages of 66 line blue and white print out on perforated paper or nothing. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Content-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1407280941380.4179@minas-tirith.valinor> El 2014-07-27 a las 23:46 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/27/2014 11:06 PM, Damon Register wrote:
Why not just T'Bird at it in the first place? That's what I did here years ago, before I moved all my email off to a mail server hub and ran Are you telling me that Thunderbird can directly access computer B's system mail without having to repackage as pop3 the way I have been doing it? If so, that certainly would simplify what I am trying to do. Does it matter if Thunderbird is on Windows computer A while SuSE computer B has the system mail of interest?
It matters a lot!
Before this revelation I was assuming that you were talking about a single machine and all the files were on the same machine that Thunderbird was running on. You had not mentioned this upstairs/downstairs separation before.
Same here!
Does the content of the mail from the cron job matter?
To me it does :-) It depens on what each person does with cron. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPV/2YACgkQja8UbcUWM1xsggD/enrpG0E1VmKa9trd9/juQnVf FelgcmDOnhJV8zjdmysA/2/snQMp+1zHyF1njSE6uOMQPkt7nXjuBdHHTGdMZ1zM =XWG7 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/27/2014 08:17 AM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
It's quite clear what he's doing. Thank you for understanding what I am trying to do. I might not know all the correct terms but your answer shows you know exactly what I am doing.
He knows how to configure Thunderbird to create a mail account, backed by a POP3 server. He does so for his ISP email. Right
In previous releases, he accessed his system mail (in /var/spool/mail) by running qpopperd. So he could reuse that knowledge and only needed to add another account backed by a POP3 Exactly
server (his own local server). With the demise of qpopperd his approach has gotten more difficult to realize. Yes, that is my problem.
I don't know Thunderbird, but probably one can create a mail account backed by "Unix Mailspool" or however Thunderbird calls this. That would simplify my problem if such a thing is possible.
than the mail server. qpopperd+fetchmail delivered a light-weight ability to realize that service. It's a pity that I must implement the big jack-hammer Dovecot in my infrastructure for that small nail. +1
Damon Register -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

than the mail server. qpopperd+fetchmail delivered a light-weight ability to realize that service. It's a pity that I must implement the big jack-hammer Dovecot in my infrastructure for that small nail. +1
Its a pity that Damon had to implement the 'jack hammer' of qpopper and get frightened by Dovecot when Thunderbird could do all he needed. (possibly with a few CLI extras to set up directories properly). What it boils down to is telling Thunderbird where to read the mail from. Edit => Account settings => Account Actions You can set up BOTH local (file) and remote (network) accounts there. THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO NEED TO SET UP A QPOPPER OR DOVECOT ACCOUNT TO READ THE SYSTEM MAIL. If mailx can do it then Thunderbird can do it. <grouch> Sorry but I never take "I don't know X" as valid excuse when all one has to do is a tree-walk though the on-screen menu. like it says on shoes and shirt, "just Do It". </grounch> -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Content-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1407281010410.4179@minas-tirith.valinor> El 2014-07-27 a las 22:44 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
than the mail server. qpopperd+fetchmail delivered a light-weight ability to realize that service. It's a pity that I must implement the big jack-hammer Dovecot in my infrastructure for that small nail. +1
Its a pity that Damon had to implement the 'jack hammer' of qpopper and get frightened by Dovecot when Thunderbird could do all he needed. (possibly with a few CLI extras to set up directories properly).
What it boils down to is telling Thunderbird where to read the mail from.
Edit => Account settings => Account Actions
You can set up BOTH local (file) and remote (network) accounts there.
THERE IS ABSOLUTELY NO NEED TO SET UP A QPOPPER OR DOVECOT ACCOUNT TO READ THE SYSTEM MAIL. If mailx can do it then Thunderbird can do it.
Except that he neglected to say that the "reading" happened on a different machine than the one where the system mail originated. That changes everything and explains why qpopper was a good solution. Apparently, qpopper is available on 13.1: minas-tirith:~ # webpin qpopper 3 results (2 packages) found for "qpopper" in openSUSE_131 * openSUSE-release: openSUSE - 13.1.1.10 [suse-oss] - 13.1.1.1 [home:smilart:SUSE_13.1] * logcheck-database: Database of system log rules for the use of log checkers - 1.2.68.2.1 [home:rbos] minas-tirith:~ # But I don't see it with zypper :-? - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPWBncACgkQja8UbcUWM1xraAEAnEEMsjQ25+SwEAhIatVUoXsx kiqVv0sV1f/QyI0So+YBAJrc6Yhob8K5AUfCzcCfmY3cVYFhvrXvw+U38moHEe2x =yLoE -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 7/28/2014 4:14 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Except that he neglected to say that the "reading" happened on a different machine than the one where the system mail originated. That changes everything and explains why qpopper was a good solution. True, and I will have to accept that I could have provided more detail. I just never imagined that the topic could have drifted so much to where such detail becomes important. My original question was and still is how to configure dovecot to do what I did with qpopper, which is to pass system mail messages to a pop3 server where a pop3 capable client on any machine (same or different) could get the messages.
Other than to judge the sanity of my approach, I don't see the relevance of knowing if the computers are same or separate. Qpopper's website explains what qpopper does in a seemingly simple way. http://www.eudora.com/products/unsupported/qpopper/index.html Qpopper is the most widely-used server for the POP3 protocol (this allows users to access their mail using any POP3 client). Qpopper supports the latest standards, and includes a large number of optional features. Qpopper is normally used with standard UNIX mail transfer and delivery agents such as sendmail or smail. That said, sure I am up for learning new things. If there are alternate and possibly better ways to accomplish something, I wouldn't mind at least trying. If I learn something along the way, that should be good since I might have more options when presented with a new problem or goal in the future. Part of the problem is that I am not a fast learner. I need 27 8x10 color glossy photographs with the circles and arrows...
But I don't see it with zypper :-? strange.
Damon Register -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/28/2014 01:32 PM, Damon Register wrote:
On 7/28/2014 4:14 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Except that he neglected to say that the "reading" happened on a different machine than the one where the system mail originated. That changes everything and explains why qpopper was a good solution.
True, and I will have to accept that I could have provided more detail.
*ALWAYS* Provide detail! As I hope I made clear, with one machine qpopper/dovecot is unnecessary. As I also hope we've made clear there is more than one way to get mail notification from cron even with two machines, and not need qpopper/dovecot.
I just never imagined that the topic could have drifted so much to where such detail becomes important.
Since it pretty fundamental I'm not sure you should call it a detail. A 'detail" might be you not telling us whether you are using Dovecot v1 or dovecot v2.
My original question was and still is how to configure dovecot to do what I did with qpopper,
That will depend on a detail you haven't told us yet: whether you are using Dovecot v1 or dovecot v2.
Other than to judge the sanity of my approach, I don't see the relevance of knowing if the computers are same or separate.
Its not about 'sanity'. There are things you can do on a single machine that you can't do on two separate machines. And there are things you can do with two Linux machines that you can't do with a Linux machine and windows machine.
Qpopper's website explains what qpopper does in a seemingly simple way.
[snip] transfer and delivery agents such as sendmail or smail.
That it mentions those and not Postfix (which has been the Linux standard for over a decade), Smail-3 (which replaced smail in about 1990-something), exim (which is the most common alternative to Postfix for Linux users who are frightened by the apparent complexity of Postfix) tells you just, or at least tells me, how out of date that information is.
That said, sure I am up for learning new things. If there are alternate and possibly better ways to accomplish something, I wouldn't mind at least trying.
Larry Wall said "There's more than one way to do things". With Linux that is such a gross understatement! The thing is not only did you not tell us about the two machines, not only have you not told us what version of Dovecot you are running, not only have you not told us whether the email is the cron daemon reporting by email or if it is the task that the cron daemon runs which reports by mail, but you haven't told us what the task the cron daemon runs *does*. It is quite possible that "the better way" might involve not using cron at all. Who knows? We certainly don't because you are not telling us these "details". -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-28 a las 13:32 -0400, Damon Register escribió:
On 7/28/2014 4:14 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
Except that he neglected to say that the "reading" happened on a different machine than the one where the system mail originated. That changes everything and explains why qpopper was a good solution.
True, and I will have to accept that I could have provided more detail. I just never imagined that the topic could have drifted so much to where such detail becomes important. My original question was and still is how to configure dovecot to do what I did with qpopper, which is to pass system mail messages to a pop3 server where a pop3 capable client on any machine (same or different) could get the messages.
dovecot is a pop/imap server.
Other than to judge the sanity of my approach, I don't see the relevance of knowing if the computers are same or separate. Qpopper's website explains what qpopper does in a seemingly simple way.
It is crucial info! You do not need to use qpopper, nor dovecot, if reading the email on the same machine where it is generated. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPW6okACgkQja8UbcUWM1xCogD+NsPmuV1coKYIUZDDz1PAEKgB L+/JcmmSHpSPidJTzjIA/11S0T5e8RRI99/L2Lfqia7C8pJ0Hyukzh9BZ5o/Zahc =LY8r -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-29 a las 02:27 +0200, Carlos E. R. escribió:
El 2014-07-28 a las 13:32 -0400, Damon Register escribió:
On 7/28/2014 4:14 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
My original question was and still is how to configure dovecot to do what I did with qpopper, which is to pass system mail messages to a pop3 server where a pop3 capable client on any machine (same or different) could get the messages.
dovecot is a pop/imap server.
I'll try to add some more info tomorrow. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPW7RIACgkQja8UbcUWM1y7ZwD+IfyiIPIiJesxMaS9NBS66SWl yfU+w1r1w7B0ovSKVIgA/1XOxcgxuA/08bs2FnJpn5ILcAV2/ePEmXC8kNupyHhd =0knR -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Le 29/07/2014 02:38, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
dovecot is a pop/imap server.
I'll try to add some more info tomorrow.
just in case I have some infos here: http://dodin.info/wiki/index.php?n=Doc.DovecotConfigure but this is probably not the very case needed here jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/28/14 04:44, Anton Aylward wrote:
than the mail server. qpopperd+fetchmail delivered a light-weight ability to realize that service. It's a pity that I must implement the big jack-hammer Dovecot in my infrastructure for that small nail. +1
Its a pity that Damon had to implement the 'jack hammer' of qpopper and get frightened by Dovecot when Thunderbird could do all he needed.
Besides that impression of yours (where I still think you don't grok the actual problem of Damon), I want to insist that qpopper is exactly *not* the jack-hammer, but Dovecot is. I find it devious that you turn my words by 180° and turn them in the exact opposite what I wanted to tell. qopper was light-weight. Dovecot is a jack-hammer. It is *not* the other way round. We are forced to use Dovecot, if we don't want to support our own sources and installation. We are forced to supplant a light-weight POP3 solution by an IMAP jack-hammer that we don't need. You name it the other way round, you turn the words in my mouth. I would not have thought that of you, I consider that highly unprofessional and not worth your contributions to this mailing list. I am severly disappointed, I thought better of you. There are many use cases for light-weight POP3 download capabilities of emails, and one prominent one disappeared. Use-cases presented to the previous installation are ignored. We, the people who try to make the infrastructure work, are labeled as dinosaures (just read one of those condescending Mr. Rodriguez' emails). As it happens so often in Linux-land nowadays, we are told that we are supposed to not need the functionality we are supposed to provide to our users. I started to use Unix in 1981. My first Linux was a Slackware installation in 1993, 0.99.4. Linux was brilliant; I got delivered ready to use software that I had to compile and install myself before on MUNIX, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, et.al. My /usr/local got empty. You know what happened since then? In the last few years, my /usr/local fills up again. (qpopper is there, FWIW.) Used applications disappear, without replacement. That's important: I embrance change if it adds features or opportunities. I resent it if it's haphazzard without delivering advantages in professional environments like data centers. I have to supply local applications again, or unpackaged replacements, locally. I believed /usr/local to be a zombie, to be forgotten soon, but Linux distributions pour life in it. It's a deja vu from the late 80s / early 90s. That development, that direction of openSUSE, is welcomed and furthered by guys like Mr. Rodriguez, but not by me. Joachim PS: And don't ask me about Docker, and similar unmanaged deployment infrastructure developments. While it supplies me with lots of income, I would rather work towards real enhancements for our *end* users, instead for our IT customers. PPS: Sorry about the rant. But is meant earnast, and the issue light-weight qpopper vs. heavy-weight Dovecot is not solved at all. Don't let yourself irritate by the rest of this email. :-/ -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Op dinsdag 29 juli 2014 03:02:01 schreef Joachim Schrod:
Besides that impression of yours (where I still think you don't grok the actual problem of Damon), I want to insist that qpopper is exactly *not* the jack-hammer, but Dovecot is. I find it devious that you turn my words by 180° and turn them in the exact opposite what I wanted to tell.
qopper was light-weight. Dovecot is a jack-hammer. It is *not* the other way round.
We are forced to use Dovecot, if we don't want to support our own sources and installation. We are forced to supplant a light-weight POP3 solution by an IMAP jack-hammer that we don't need.
I wonder why nobody comes up with courier pop3/imap; you can use only pop3 if you want to. I use it with imap since I use openSUSE, which is now about 11 years. It has not changed much. You need to change postfix a little bit, delivery should go to a maildir type mailbox (parameter home_mailbox = Maildir/), which corresponds with MAILDIRPATH=Maildir in /etc/courier/pop3d . You also need courier-authlib Keep only authpam in authmodulelist in file /etc/authlib/authdaemonrc . systemd services that need to be enabled and started are courier- authdaemon.service and courier-pop.service. -- fr.gr. member openSUSE Freek de Kruijf -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/29/14 14:13, Freek de Kruijf wrote:
Op dinsdag 29 juli 2014 03:02:01 schreef Joachim Schrod:
Besides that impression of yours (where I still think you don't grok the actual problem of Damon), I want to insist that qpopper is exactly *not* the jack-hammer, but Dovecot is. I find it devious that you turn my words by 180° and turn them in the exact opposite what I wanted to tell.
qopper was light-weight. Dovecot is a jack-hammer. It is *not* the other way round.
We are forced to use Dovecot, if we don't want to support our own sources and installation. We are forced to supplant a light-weight POP3 solution by an IMAP jack-hammer that we don't need.
I wonder why nobody comes up with courier pop3/imap; you can use only pop3 if you want to.
Thanks for this hint; I'll have a look at it if it's easier to handle. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-29 a las 21:18 +0200, Joachim Schrod escribió:
I wonder why nobody comes up with courier pop3/imap; you can use only pop3 if you want to.
Thanks for this hint; I'll have a look at it if it's easier to handle.
Both courier and dovecot are similarly powerful software pieces. I believe courier to be way more complex. <http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courier_Mail_Server> Dovecot includes pop3, too, if that is what you want. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPYQJUACgkQja8UbcUWM1xU8gD+OKPJTHIrqKGmmQY26Z056Tfo IospUvZFA3Y3VpyFFXwA/1xV1KkOHdHzqZC5Xdc1lgG5tF4sDlSloBeoLgM46/wa =VDes -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/28/2014 09:02 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
You name it the other way round,
No I did not. I said that compared to using _just_ Thunderbird _alone_ that qpopper was a jack hammer. There are many reasons for bloat. They include machine word size :-) If you want an example of pervasive bloat compare the original shell you were using back in 1981 (what was that, V7? BSD 2.8?) written by Stephen Bourne and whose source code used, via macros, a version of C that read more like the ALGOL of the compiler he wrote at Cambridge (which was a marvellous piece of code!). It was small, tight, and tidied up after itself. By comparison our current shell is a whale to that tiddler, and for anything except some interactive work offers only a slight improvement with a few inbuilt functions - the 80/20 rule holds. I came to "commerce" from "aerospace" and one of my first jobs was quality control. One pervasive problem I found was lack of error handling. Coders would make system calls and not check the return status. Programs would have no error handling & recovery, they would either just carry on after errors of simply die. I asked some programmers about this. Their responses varied by on the whole to things stood out. The first was that checking every last return and writing error handlers was too tedious and was boring and took away from the enjoyment of programming, and the second was that it bloated the program "unnecessarily, since errors rarely happened", and also slowed down the execution. Whether you consider that a valid argument says a lot about the environment you work in. The other cause of bloat I see is in the code needed to make GUIs work. At the very fundamental level the X-protocol is huge and unwieldy, as the Wayland (and Y and MicroXwin and Xynth and Fresco) system shows. We've had this X protocol since 1987 and in reality those basic principles that Bob Scheifler and Jim Gettys set out have been very limiting. Perhaps the most crippling was "mechanism rather than policy". To get around that we've had to layer libraries that map (comparatively) simple high level operations that are common in the application layer to the mass of detail that X requires. We call those libraries GTK and QT. Something that implemented GTK or QT directly (or more directly) would be a boon! So while I agree with you about bloat, I think you are (a) confusing bloat with diversity. Having more in /{*/}bin may be more about addressing issue that are not apparent. I may not use the host of LVM tools other grub2-* programs tucked away in /sbin and /usr/sbin very much, and yes they "bloat out" the "ls" listings. Yes I have a LOT of scripts in my ~anton/bin. But that is diversity for you. The there's (b) confusing complexity for functionality. Sorry, but while qpopper might have addressed what I was doing in the last century it doesn't begin to deal with the variety and diversity of my needs today. If I were still running an ISP I'd need the capability in Dovecot to keep up with user demands and maintain a place in the marketplace. "Bloat"? You might consider many of today's athletes bloated too, but the records they achieve are way ahead of the athletes of a century ago. So many sports rely on strength, muscle mass, lung capacity. Size counts. So while I believe in parsimony in many areas, I also want code that checks the return status on calls, has the 'extras' that prevent buffer overflow and sql-injection and many other errors and bugs that a few extra lines and checks can avoid and has error handling. If I want my system to go on a diet I'd rather push to replace X by Wayland and put GTK and QT closer to "the bare metal". I'm not interested in giving up functionality that I have to rely on. And as far as bloat goes, dovecot scores very low. It is very tightly coded. The daemon, the anvil, the login processes, and the clients on my mail hub all add up to about one tenth the size of my Thunderbird at run-time. (Both by virtual and resident memory needs.) Perhaps that has to do with plugins. I don't run many dovecot plugins but I do run lots of Thunderbird plugins. Dovecot is very configurable that way. What you don't want you simply don't configure in. I wish more software had that kind of "complexity" :-) OBTW: what's happening with Wayland for openSuse? -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Content-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1407291553140.4179@minas-tirith.valinor> El 2014-07-29 a las 03:02 +0200, Joachim Schrod escribió:
On 07/28/14 04:44, Anton Aylward wrote:
Its a pity that Damon had to implement the 'jack hammer' of qpopper and get frightened by Dovecot when Thunderbird could do all he needed.
Besides that impression of yours (where I still think you don't grok the actual problem of Damon), I want to insist that qpopper is exactly *not* the jack-hammer, but Dovecot is. I find it devious that you turn my words by 180° and turn them in the exact opposite what I wanted to tell.
qopper was light-weight. Dovecot is a jack-hammer. It is *not* the other way round.
For looking at system email on the same machine, you do not need qpopper, nor dovecot, or any such thing. A Linux mail client should be able to pick those directly, as files. So, in that sense, qpopper is superfluous, "bloat". For looking at email from another computer, then qpopper is easier to setup than dovecot (which provides both pop3 and imap). So, alternatives: - Show Damon how to build qpopper - Show Damon how to configure dovecot for the simple use of reading the system mail from the spool. It should work out of the box. - Show Damon other alternatives, like using putty and pine on the Windows, machine, or adding an smtp daemon to Windows. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPXqYoACgkQja8UbcUWM1wlTgD/W35iPtB1yISL8buSLpwO6/kD JGTQRAvOFFvYmKTY2qMBAJJFbM0vCLZDbjWWIye6pHiEEUWomhxdkfQgvzxKFCwA =z2jS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/28/2014 09:02 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
qopper was light-weight. Dovecot is a jack-hammer. It is *not* the other way round.
We are forced to use Dovecot, if we don't want to support our own sources and installation. We are forced to supplant a light-weight POP3 solution by an IMAP jack-hammer that we don't need.
For Daamon that may be the case. For me, its not. Qpopper simply cannot do what I require of a IMAP server. It doesn't matter if qpopper were one-ten-thousandth the size or demands of Dovecot if it can't do the job. A jack hammer can do jobs that a toothpick can't. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Every decision you make closes of some avenues and opens up others. Damon chose to use two machines to do a job that might under other circumstances been done with just one. He chose to run a job configured in a certain way under cron which was in turn configured a certain way. He chose to have notification of the results delivered by email. He could have made other choices. He still can revise some of those choices. If anybody is 'forcing' you then in reality it is you, because of a focus on choices. You could, for example, as Carlos pointed out, use webpin for find that qpopper *is* in fact available for 13.1. Context is everything. I've made different choices from you, have different motivations, needs and values. Dovecot does a job for me that qpopper cannot, and when I look at the numbers I disagree with you about bloat. When I run 'ps' and look at the viral and physical memory demands, the cumulative cpu demands of Dovecot it is the lightest of the applications I run, lighter than any of the KDE components. And so massively lighter than Thunderbird! If Dovecot is a jack-hammer then we are getting jack-hammer capability for tooth-pick price. Those are the numbers. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/29/14 16:43, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/28/2014 09:02 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
qopper was light-weight. Dovecot is a jack-hammer. It is *not* the other way round.
We are forced to use Dovecot, if we don't want to support our own sources and installation. We are forced to supplant a light-weight POP3 solution by an IMAP jack-hammer that we don't need.
For Daamon that may be the case.
We have agreed already, that Damon probably doesn't need any of it -- if Thunderbird supports Unix mailspools, where there is a high probability. My last email took the discussion further, about general usage of qpopper beyond Damon's use case.
For me, its not.
I don't have a problem with you using Dovecot if you need its functionality. I have a problem if you tell me that a light-weight POP3 server like qpopper is not needed any more. I have presented a use case that is straight forward: automated email processing of a mail account on another system, while not using IMAP or other network-aware rMUAs for other accounts.
Nobody is forcing you to do anything.
I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/29/2014 03:28 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me.
Let me see if I have a correct understanding here. You are complaining that qpopper is not in the main openSuse distribution. That it is one of the other repositories at download.opensuse doesn't matter to you. Well many of us take the time out to install the KDE * KDE_Extra repositories, the vlc repository, the ham radio or the photography or the various audio/multimedia repositories as well, but install one for qpopper or using the 'one-click install' that Carlos pointed to is too much effort. That its still available from sourceforge doesn't matter to you. That its available from a number of mirror sites, documented on the main qpooper page at Eudora.com (via qpopper.org) That its available at rpmfind doesn't matter. I think you are being unreasonable. I think that adding those repositories have been an advantage to me. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Content-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1407300237050.4179@minas-tirith.valinor> El 2014-07-29 a las 16:57 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/29/2014 03:28 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me.
There are many tools that have disapeared. for instance, uw-imap, a very simple to setup imap and pop3 server, has disapeared as well, probably because its developper died. Such is life... software comes and goes.
Let me see if I have a correct understanding here.
You are complaining that qpopper is not in the main openSuse distribution.
That it is one of the other repositories at download.opensuse doesn't matter to you.
No, no, sorry, there is a misunderstanding here: <http://software.opensuse.org/search?p=1&baseproject=openSUSE:13.1&q=qpopper> finds nothing. However, webpin does, but it is unclear what it really finds: cer@minas-tirith:~> webpin qpopper 3 results (2 packages) found for "qpopper" in openSUSE_131 * openSUSE-release: openSUSE - 13.1.1.10 [suse-oss] - 13.1.1.1 [home:smilart:SUSE_13.1] * logcheck-database: Database of system log rules for the use of log checkers - 1.2.68.2.1 [home:rbos] cer@minas-tirith:~> It is possible that the package containing qpopper is named differently. Or that webpin finds the word somewhere, but not the package. I suggest you (Joachim) search for this post - I had forgotten this, but it was me who raised the question of qpopper disapeareance: Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 23:07:09 +0100 From: Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger <...@opensuse.org> To: OS-fctry <opensuse-factory@opensuse.org> Subject: Re: [opensuse-factory] Question regarding qpopper ... +++·································· Looking at the request history, qpopper was removed from Factory in April 2013: 172534 State:accepted By:coolo When:2013-04-19T14:43:15 delete: openSUSE:Factory/qpopper Review by Group is accepted: legal-auto(licensedigger) Review by Group is accepted: factory-auto(factory-auto) From: review(coolo) -> new(licensedigger) Descr: see sr172445 Comment: ok 172445 State:revoked By:coolo When:2013-04-19T14:14:19 submit: openSUSE:Factory/qpopper -> devel:openSUSE:Factory:legal-queue Review by Group is declined: legal-team(babelworx) Looking into the details of 172445 shows: Review: declined Group: legal-team 2013-04-19T10:10:15 babelworx unsuitable license ··································++- and: <https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=850801> So forget it, qpopper is not comming back to openSUSE. If you want it, you have to build it yourself. Sorry about that. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPYP1gACgkQja8UbcUWM1yEswEAhzYnrjxyov7s3eta39nOhwLJ XCobVCpFnOphBq9GRmMBAJCEABj1YqBPtPMG0UhjKiF/2OkhgYSUARl3FQOBq6lm =LkR4 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-30 a las 02:41 +0200, Carlos E. R. escribió:
finds nothing. However, webpin does, but it is unclear what it really finds:
cer@minas-tirith:~> webpin qpopper 3 results (2 packages) found for "qpopper" in openSUSE_131 * openSUSE-release: openSUSE - 13.1.1.10 [suse-oss] - 13.1.1.1 [home:smilart:SUSE_13.1] * logcheck-database: Database of system log rules for the use of log checkers - 1.2.68.2.1 [home:rbos] cer@minas-tirith:~>
It is possible that the package containing qpopper is named differently. Or that webpin finds the word somewhere, but not the package.
I think I found out, by comparing with "pin qpopper": ./suse/noarch/susehelp-2009.10.06-19.1.2.noarch.rpm: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 280 Sep 28 09:04 /usr/share/susehelp/meta/Manuals/Productivity/qpopper.desktop ./suse/noarch/logwatch-7.4.0-11.1.4.noarch.rpm: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1040 Sep 27 23:26 /usr/share/logwatch/default.conf/services/in.qpopper.conf ./suse/noarch/logwatch-7.4.0-11.1.4.noarch.rpm: -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 4994 Sep 27 23:26 /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/services/in.qpopper So it is a false positive. Webpin has been broken for several years, so I had forgotten about its nuances. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPYQ1MACgkQja8UbcUWM1zK9AD8DOV9c+Gtja+PMe45TTLKwYFO rChfTShffjjw17UrSYQBAJO3wGIi8K0PRoSm3GcLypg3aVG56ZJocZRv+Ejw0+PL =FmBf -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/30/14 02:41, Carlos E. R. wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
Content-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1407300237050.4179@minas-tirith.valinor>
El 2014-07-29 a las 16:57 -0400, Anton Aylward escribió:
On 07/29/2014 03:28 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me.
There are many tools that have disapeared.
for instance, uw-imap, a very simple to setup imap and pop3 server, has disapeared as well, probably because its developper died. Such is life... software comes and goes.
Yes, I know. If there would be another light-weight POP3 server replacement; I wouldn't actually engage in this discussion. In fact, for me it's irrelevant, I can and do compile/install/manage such software myself. I try to explain to Anton that the approach of "I don't need it, so it's not relevant if it's available for openSUSE, and - by implication - you don't need it either" is not a proper one. I don't seem to succeed with that explanation, though. :-(
I suggest you (Joachim) search for this post - I had forgotten this, but it was me who raised the question of qpopper disapeareance:
Oh; I know that qpopper is gone. That's not an open question for me.
So forget it, qpopper is not comming back to openSUSE. If you want it, you have to build it yourself.
I do already. Since you're the 2nd person who didn't understand that, I was obviously too dense in my comments. Let me elaborate: /usr/local has been traditionally the place where software is installed that was neither delivered by the vendor (nowadays read: distribution) nor by an ISV. (ISV software often installs itself in /opt, following a convention from UNIX(tm).) I still use that convention, and have site-specific software installed there. Looking at our installation, I observe that the size of /usr/local increases over the last few years. I have to manage and maintain software myself that once was supplied by openSUSE. That trend is actually the trigger why I started to engage in this discussion -- not the actual demise of qpopper. Obviously, I didn't succed in getting this message across. Btw, please note: When I write about /usr/local installations, I don't write about manual "make install" or such. Actual installation is managed by packages and Puppet, that's not something that's done manual. Any system in my installation must be replacable within a few minutes by fully automated means, e.g., in case of hardware problems. While almost all our disks are redundant (mirrored, laptops being an exception), CPUs and power supply ain't so; we use spare hardware if they fail. Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/29/2014 10:09 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
I try to explain to Anton that the approach of "I don't need it, so it's not relevant if it's available for openSUSE, and - by implication - you don't need it either" is not a proper one. I don't seem to succeed with that explanation, though. :-(
That is not what I was saying. You continue to misquote me. My point is that it is available, by other means. Its just not part of the packaged distribution. As Carlos makes clear, because of the licence. I chose to use Dovecot. As it turns out the Dovcot I originally used a couple of installation back I could not find in the distribution so I downloaded and built v2 myself. Thankfully FOSS gives us this option, even when we cross licence boundaries. There are many items which are not in the packaged distribution because of licence restrictions; the nvidia drivers, various codec and things that are needed to play videos. That's why there are other repositories outside of download.opensuse. I make the choice to use those other other repositories. If I wanted to use qpopper I would obtain it or the source or some other rpm (there's a pile of them at rpmfind.org). I don't seem to have succeeded n my explanation either :-( -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-30 a las 04:09 +0200, Joachim Schrod escribió:
On 07/30/14 02:41, Carlos E. R. wrote:
So forget it, qpopper is not comming back to openSUSE. If you want it, you have to build it yourself.
I do already. Since you're the 2nd person who didn't understand that, I was obviously too dense in my comments. Let me elaborate:
/usr/local has been traditionally the place where software is installed that was neither delivered by the vendor (nowadays read: distribution) nor by an ISV. (ISV software often installs itself in /opt, following a convention from UNIX(tm).) I still use that convention, and have site-specific software installed there.
Yep.
Looking at our installation, I observe that the size of /usr/local increases over the last few years. I have to manage and maintain software myself that once was supplied by openSUSE. That trend is actually the trigger why I started to engage in this discussion -- not the actual demise of qpopper. Obviously, I didn't succed in getting this message across.
Ok, understood. But in my case, that directory is getting smaller each year :-) Mostly scripts. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPY02AACgkQja8UbcUWM1wY+gD+NgROYcMsle9k7KOx/pfc4zb9 ciSx8ViZVw0l6t/JEcYA/2S01x0vPaPlPzye8W+LR10QNLuQQz4+v5HlvJw2JHEa =pe+O -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/29/14 22:57, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/29/2014 03:28 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me.
Let me see if I have a correct understanding here.
You are complaining that qpopper is not in the main openSuse distribution.
No. I bemoan that packages are abandoned by the community. I complain that you don't see this as a problem.
That it is one of the other repositories at download.opensuse doesn't matter to you.
Would you please tell me which one? Searching OBS finds none. If there would be one, I wouldn't write posts in this thread.
That its still available from sourceforge doesn't matter to you.
I *do* compile it myself nowadays. As I've written before in this thread: My /usr/local fills up again, like it did in the 90s. Was this not clear enough to you, who style yourself as an oldtimer? It means that I have to compile free software again, like I did in the SunOS times when we ported X10. Of course, I do so -- I've done it in the past, and I'm able to do it now. But I don't like that I have to do it. Linux distributions once delivered the advantage that I do *not* have to compile and install stuff myself. My puppet configuration needs to add more and more stuff to my installation that is managed locally. That's not a good thing in my book, and that's the point I'm trying to make.
I think you are being unreasonable.
I think that you either don't read completely or don't understand what I write. You assert things that I never Joachim -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Joachim Schrod, Roedermark, Germany Email: jschrod@acm.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/29/2014 09:52 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
On 07/29/14 22:57, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/29/2014 03:28 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me.
Let me see if I have a correct understanding here.
You are complaining that qpopper is not in the main openSuse distribution.
No. I bemoan that packages are abandoned by the community.
Perhaps you should bemona that some packages use licences that are acceptable to certian packagers.
I complain that you don't see this as a problem.
Since I don't want the packagers to be hounded by lawyers for licence contravention, I look at "two evils" and think about which is the lesser. That various items are not in the distribution, libdvdcss, acroread, nvidia drivers, because of licence restrictions doesn't mean I can't obtain them elsewhere. For consistency you should be complaining that, like qpopper, these are not part of the distribution.
That it is one of the other repositories at download.opensuse doesn't matter to you.
Would you please tell me which one? Searching OBS finds none. If there would be one, I wouldn't write posts in this thread.
Didn't Carlos answer that?
That its still available from sourceforge doesn't matter to you.
I *do* compile it myself nowadays.
So what are you complaining?
As I've written before in this thread: My /usr/local fills up again, like it did in the 90s. Was this not clear enough to you, who style yourself as an oldtimer?
I don't see its relevance. If you are saying that you chose to put you own compiled stuff there then that is also a chouce. I can understand why you might want to, in that you want to keep /usr/bin, /usr/lib for the distribution and to have /usr/local on a separate FS that survives the wipe-and-install of an upgrade. But why should this be a concern? We have PATH. We have /etc/alternatives; we have shell executable caching. We have kernel inode and pathanme caching.
It means that I have to compile free software again, like I did in the SunOS times when we ported X10. Of course, I do so -- I've done it in the past, and I'm able to do it now. But I don't like that I have to do it.
Back to what I said about "choices". Or are you saying that the alternatives you want to run are overwhelming? How so? I have a few 3rd party and pay-for application that I have to install in /usr/local and /opt but I don't find them a burden. You are imply that what you have in /usr/local represents something sizeable when compared with /usr/bin and /usr/lib.
Linux distributions once delivered the advantage that I do *not* have to compile and install stuff myself. My puppet configuration needs to add more and more stuff to my installation that is managed locally. That's not a good thing in my book, and that's the point I'm trying to make.
So this is about about Puppet, then? What about those of us who have to install applicant under Apache Struts or Java (I have over a dozen 3rd party Java apps) or other web based applications. The point is that these are not part of the distribution -- but so what? The packagers have their work cut out for them as it is. I don't see why more demands should be placed on them.
I think you are being unreasonable.
I think that you either don't read completely or don't understand what I write. You assert things that I never
Tit for tat ??? -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- "Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of bleeding,he sings." -- Ed Gardner -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/29/2014 09:52 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
On 07/29/14 22:57, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/29/2014 03:28 PM, Joachim Schrod wrote:
Nobody is forcing you to do anything. I beg to differ. When a tool that I used for decades disappears from a distribution, I *am* forced to do something. I don't do that change by free choice, it doesn't come with any advantage for me.
Let me see if I have a correct understanding here.
You are complaining that qpopper is not in the main openSuse distribution.
No. I bemoan that packages are abandoned by the community.
I complain that you don't see this as a problem.
Just to clarify https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=850801#c3 It seems to me that the packagers were "forced* to do something to stay legal. No, wait, they had a choice too, they could have violated the licence ... -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-30 a las 03:52 +0200, Joachim Schrod escribió:
On 07/29/14 22:57, Anton Aylward wrote:
You are complaining that qpopper is not in the main openSuse distribution.
No. I bemoan that packages are abandoned by the community.
Well, qpopper had to be abandoned, because it is not legal for the community to package it... An unfortunate situation, yes, but you can not blame the community for that. AFAIK, the community did want to keep it. Yes, I do see the utility of having qpopper in the distribution. I used uw-imap in the past, which also disapeared (despite the name, it supports both pop3 and imap), and required nil configuration. I was forced to turn to dovecot as well - and then I found that I liked it more. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPY0KUACgkQja8UbcUWM1yMBwD/RsoN+q3QsMEIQMUgh4AekW3u j//PQrw7T2bFo1twoCUA/3dpf5GsbRVlJRjLiB9c8xLniNbHHIIi448WNv6HeLYL =YKSo -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

On 07/27/2014 10:24 PM, Damon Register wrote:
I don't know Thunderbird, but probably one can create a mail account backed by "Unix Mailspool" or however Thunderbird calls this. That would simplify my problem if such a thing is possible.
In the list of accounts, go to "Local files", right click and select "import export tools". Select "import mbox file". When the dialogue box come up navigate to /usr/spool/mail and select your mbox there. Now, if you are fetching your email from your ISP via POP or IMAP and have that set up with Thunderbird all you mail is under you control with no need for qpopper, dovecot or sendmail/postfix or fetchmail or procmail. If, for some reason, the system was delivering to ~/Mail or ~/Mail/INBOX you can set up that as well. Thunderbird is quite flexible. You just have to configure it. This was all discovered just by walking the menus without needing to make use of Mozilla's help facilities or googling to see how other people have done it. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

Le 28/07/2014 05:03, Anton Aylward a écrit :
In the list of accounts, go to "Local files", right click and select "import export tools". Select "import mbox file". When the dialogue box come up navigate to /usr/spool/mail and select your mbox there.
well, I didn't even imagine thunderbird could do this. Nice to learn things (not that I need them now, but may be later :-) thanks jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 El 2014-07-28 a las 08:24 +0200, jdd escribió:
Le 28/07/2014 05:03, Anton Aylward a écrit :
In the list of accounts, go to "Local files", right click and select "import export tools". Select "import mbox file". When the dialogue box come up navigate to /usr/spool/mail and select your mbox there.
well, I didn't even imagine thunderbird could do this. Nice to learn things (not that I need them now, but may be later :-)
I can not locate the feature. In the list of accounts, I see "Local Folders", not "Local files". Assuming it is the same place, I do not see anywhere named "import" anything. I do see "Account Actions" at the bottom, the only possibility is "add other account", and there it is either "Unix Mailspool (Movemail)", or "Newsgroup account". The one I think it is is the "movemail" thing, but I'm unsure. Import mbox, which I can not locate, would, as far as I know, make a copy of an existing mbox file, but would not see any new mail appearing there. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPWCQwACgkQja8UbcUWM1zxywD8D1YgPrrHmt+mzJ686t8T3rjS TnxbUtgRrV4HQcQQwOkBAJ2iQJp8aAkiKyi1wZvUuiMQOmNlyaJSar07YgJmoCHx =obOg -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

Le 28/07/2014 10:25, Carlos E. R. a écrit :
I can not locate the feature.
In the list of accounts, I see "Local Folders", not "Local files". Assuming it is the same place, I do not see anywhere named "import" anything.
I have (french - probable english) Local folder Dossiers de stockage - mail folders Configuration des dossiers - folder config ajouter importer exporter - add import export jdd -- http://www.dodin.org -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/28/2014 04:25 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
El 2014-07-28 a las 08:24 +0200, jdd escribió:
Le 28/07/2014 05:03, Anton Aylward a écrit :
In the list of accounts, go to "Local files", right click and select "import export tools". Select "import mbox file". When the dialogue box come up navigate to /usr/spool/mail and select your mbox there.
well, I didn't even imagine thunderbird could do this. Nice to learn things (not that I need them now, but may be later :-)
I can not locate the feature.
In the list of accounts, I see "Local Folders", not "Local files". Assuming it is the same place, I do not see anywhere named "import" anything.
Did you 'right-click'? That brings up the relevant menu. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 7/28/2014 7:19 AM, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 07/28/2014 04:25 AM, Carlos E. R. wrote:
I can not locate the feature.
In the list of accounts, I see "Local Folders", not "Local files". Assuming it is the same place, I do not see anywhere named "import" anything.
Did you 'right-click'? That brings up the relevant menu. I don't find that feature either. Yes, I did right click.
Damon Register -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 07/26/2014 05:20 PM, Damon Register wrote:
I have just installed SuSE 13.1 and I wanted to install qpopper since that is what I was using to make local sendmail available to Thunderbird (pop3). I found that qpopper was missing from the repository and with a little google work, I found one post that asked about qpopper for 13.1. One person suggested using dovecot so I thought I would give it a try.
Installing was easy and I thought running might be too. I started the service through yast, services manager. It seemed that dovecot didn't stay running so as suggested in dovecot manual, I looked at /var/log/mail. I saw that it failed on detection of the mail folder for my username. The manual had some info about that and suggested editing the dovecot.conf file. I did and now dovecot seems to be working and I can even connect from Thunderbird.
It appears however that I might not understand very well how to get my goal for dovecot. I see that dovecot works and Thunderbird connects but I see that dovecot has created its own set of mail files and folders in the mail dir that seem to be parallel to the sendmail files but not connected with the sendmail files.
Can anyone tell me how to get dovecot to do what I used to do with qpopper? I want dovecot to repackage sendmail messages for use by Thunderbird (or any other pop3 client).
Damon Register
Damon, One thing that may help you out is getting the big picture on mail handling, and then look at where you want dovecot to fit in. Over-simplified you have: o your MTA (mail transport agent), postfix, handles sending/receiving and delivery to your system mail spool: /var/spool/mail/<username> (or the spool on the remote host where you get your mail) o you Mail Retrieval software (dovecot), provides pop3, imap, imaps access to mail located in your mail spool (local or remote). In your case it will give pop3 access to mail in /var/spool/mail/<you>. It provides this access to your MUA (mail user agent) o your MUA (thunderbird) will use the access provided by dovecot to get the mail from your mail spool in /var/spool/mail and store it (or an index) in your local mail store (usually ~/Mail or ~/mail). So when you look in Mail you will see the folders and the like that thunderbird creates for you to separate the mail it gets from the mail spool into an organized fashion the way to tell it to. OK, with that understanding, you can look at a standard *dovecot 1* config of something like this: $ noc /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf disable_plaintext_auth = yes ssl_disable = no mail_location = mbox:~/Mail:INBOX=/var/spool/mail/%u protocol imap { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap } protocol pop3 { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/pop3 } protocol lda { postmaster_address = postmaster@example.com mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/lda } auth default { mechanisms = plain passdb pam { } userdb passwd { } user = root } dict { } plugin { } That is a standard conf I used with dovecot 1 for years. Dovecot 2 conf is actually shorter, but very different. Good luck. -- 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

On 07/26/2014 06:50 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:
protocol imap { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/imap }
protocol pop3 { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/pop3 } protocol lda { postmaster_address = postmaster@example.com mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/lda }
Make sure you verify the: mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib/dovecot/modules/lda I just grabbed this config from my fax server that is still running dovecot 1 on 11.0 - i586. If your box is x86_64, then the conf will probably look like: ssl = yes protocol imap { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib64/dovecot/modules/imap } protocol pop3 { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib64/dovecot/modules/pop3 } protocol managesieve { } protocol lda { mail_plugin_dir = /usr/lib64/dovecot/modules/lda } auth default { mechanisms = plain passdb pam { } userdb passwd { } user = root } dict { } plugin { } This is the same config, on an x86_64 box. The omitted lines are just due to using defaults where the same default settings were explicitly included in the i586 config originally posted. (don't panic) Good luck. -- 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

On 07/26/2014 07:50 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:
OK, with that understanding, you can look at a standard *dovecot 1* config of something like this:
That is version ONE. I don't know what is in the repository that Damon used. I downloaded V2 directly. The config is both more complex/capable but easier since it is broken down into parts that can be enabled/disabled depending on the parts being used: # ls /etc/dovecot/conf.d/ 10-auth.conf 10-master.conf 20-imap.conf 90-acl.conf auth-checkpassword.conf.ext auth-passwdfile.conf.ext auth-vpopmail.conf.ext 10-director.conf 10-ssl.conf 20-lmtp.conf 90-plugin.conf auth-deny.conf.ext auth-sql.conf.ext 10-logging.conf 15-lda.conf 20-managesieve.conf 90-quota.conf auth-ldap.conf.ext auth-static.conf.ext 10-mail.conf 15-mailboxes.conf 20-pop3.conf 90-sieve.conf auth-master.conf.ext auth-system.conf.ext Of those I only needed to active/edit 20-imap.conf -- since I was using that rather than POP3 auth-system.conf.ext -- to specify and set passwords and PAM 10-mail.conf -- describe the namespaces 10-auth.conf -- tell it to use auth-system.conf.ext rather than anther option 10-logging.conf -- I love having things logged :-) It seems overwhelming at first but the real issue is FOCUS. Dovecot is tremendously capable and configurable. Figure what you want and don't want and focus on the former and ignore the latter. If helps that I've been deal with email since the UUCP days, before 'sendmail' existed, and have run an ISPs mail service supporting thousands of users. The important this is understanding that a MTA is not a MUA and that what sendmail/Postfix/Smail-3/etc do is only relevant is you are using it to exchange mail with a peer smtp server. That means it must be listening on a port that is exposed to the internet, for the most part. Of course if you are a big organization with many departments you might be using departmental servers as peers. A lot of what a smtp server does is about routing and storage while the recipient is inaccessible, and on a single user machine "at home" dealing with your ISP it is unnecessary. Fetchmail/procmail can do the job. KISS. -- /"\ \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML Mail / \ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Content-ID: <alpine.LSU.2.11.1407301401520.4179@minas-tirith.valinor> Let's try to get back on focus, and help Damon to get dovecot working, now that we know his real setup ;-) El 2014-07-26 a las 18:20 -0400, Damon Register escribió:
work, I found one post that asked about qpopper for 13.1. One person suggested using dovecot so I thought I would give it a try.
...
Can anyone tell me how to get dovecot to do what I used to do with qpopper? I want dovecot to repackage sendmail messages for use by Thunderbird (or any other pop3 client).
What you want, gathered from other posts in this thread, is just to access system generated email in a Linux machine, but using Thunderbird on a different, Windows, machine. So you want to have a pop3 service suplying those emails. Ok, the steps are, I think - and you will get both pop3 and imap: Install dovecot version 2, default version via YaST. In directory "/etc/dovecot/" edit file "local.conf". You should do all modifications on that file only, do not touch the rest, because this way, on upgrades, you only need to migrate that single file. mail_debug = yes mail_location = mbox:~/Mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u # disable_plaintext_auth = no ssl = yes ssl_cert = </etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem ssl_key = </etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem listen = *, :: #Thunderbird can use many simultaneous conections on imap. protocol imap { mail_max_userip_connections = 20 } Edit file "dovecot-openssl.cnf" (ok, so it is two files). The names you setup there are not that important. Run "/usr/share/doc/packages/dovecot/mkcert.sh" once, while your current directory is /etc/dovecot/ It should end with: writing new private key to '/etc/ssl/private/dovecot.pem' You will also get a: /etc/ssl/certs/dovecot.pem Now, not before, start service dovecot. If things fail with strange errors, before searching, consider that the problem could be apparmor blocking, so you may need to run "aa-logprof", follow your nose, and try again starting dovecot: systemctl start dovecot.service verify with: systemctl status dovecot.service The cycling of start dovecot, aa-logprof, restart dovecot, might have to be repeated several times. Otherwise, you might consider to disable apparmor, but that is something I do not consider on servers. and finally, enable service with: systemctl enable dovecot.service That should be all. - -- Cheers Carlos E. R. (from 13.1 x86_64 "Bottle" (Minas Tirith)) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iF4EAREIAAYFAlPY4sEACgkQja8UbcUWM1wEDQD/Vh8fpUTBFnGVGceLiEOkgjCk CLkO/tQ7koTXI3Sgi4MA/ioy1+sEVyy/tEd5UQIHstm1ibh0cZwlDyBwHFehvGdd =JhKy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
participants (8)
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Anton Aylward
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Carlos E. R.
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Damon Register
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Damon Register
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David C. Rankin
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Freek de Kruijf
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jdd
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Joachim Schrod