Re: mail retrieval-delivery-sorting
On Sat, Mar 30, 2002 at 06:36:07PM +0000, David H. Askew wrote:
| I'm currently using evolution as my email client to work with both a
| pop3 and an imap account. I subscribe to several high trafic mailing
| lists and use a variety of methods from within evolution to sort my
| email etc...
|
| I'm growing tired of using Evolution and I'm wanting to use a text based
| client so I can check all my email from one location(my home pc) no
| matter where I am.
Not a bad decision at all. Note that you can still use evolution with
your new setup. Since the delivery and filtering will be independent
of the client you can switch clients around on a whim.
| I want to be able to log into my home-pc and lauch Mutt(seems to be the
| list favorite) and from what I've read, very capable. I'm considering
| the following setup... using fetchmail to get my imap and pop3 email,
| which will forward email to smtp(exim here), and use procmail rules to
| filter the email.
If you're not already familiar with procmail, then I suggest trying
out exim's filter feature instead. procmail is a bit more powerful,
but also much harder to grasp the details of working with it.
| So I'm trying to determine where to start...
|
| I would like to know if I'm forgetting any steps, before I begin..
|
| 1) configure fetchmail to retreive the emails
| -I'm assuming I will have to tell fetchmail via .fetchmailrc
| which accounts to forward the mail to? .. or in other words..
| my .fetmailrc for my personal user acount will tell fetchmail
| what to get and who to send it to(which user acount) or will it
| just send the emails to the current user?
| 2) setup basic exim config.
| -I'm going to have to tell exim to use procmail?
| 3) setup procmail rules
| 4) setup mutt to check local mail spool.
First get exim working. If exim isn't working, then fetchmail won't
be able to "deliver" the mail. (fetchmail just hands it off to exim,
it doesn't do final delivery)
| I've got no experience using any of the software in question... I'm
| smart enough to read the docs... just curious up front about the
| interconnectivity of the programs... do I have the basics, of how the 4
| programs interact, down...
For exim, start here :
http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-user%40lists.debian.org/msg82754.html
The configuration that 'eximconfig' generates will automatically use
procmail if you have a ~/.procmailrc file.
For fetchmail, this is how it's done :
poll <host> protocol imap
user <imap username> , password "<imap password>"
is <local username> here
options fetchall , stripcr , mda "/usr/sbin/exim %T"
Replace "imap" with "pop3" for your pop3 account. Note that I specify
an mda. It will use a local pipe to pass the message to it. This is
more reliable than the default, which is to use SMTP to connect to
localhost. The reason is, like I just told Karl, fetchmail is not an
SMTP server and it won't queue and retry messages that fail to be
delivered. A local pipe is much less likely to suffer from problems
like that.
For procmail, 'man procmailrc' and 'man procmailex' and take some
tylenol ;-). If you want to try out exim's filter mechanism, see
/usr/share/doc/exim/filter.txt.gz. To start you out with it, put this
in ~/.forward :
~~~~~~~~~~
# Exim filter
# be sure that error messages will be delivered to /var/mail/$USER
# regardless of any potential errors in the rest of the filter
if error_message then
finish
endif
# If it is addressed directly to me and doesn't have a Mailing-List header
if
"$header_To: $header_Cc" matches "(dsh8290|dman)@.*"
and
"$header_X-Mailing-List: $header_List-Id:" is " "
then
save $home/Mail/1Inbox/
finish
endif
#
# any debian mailing list
#
if $header_X-Mailing-List: matches "(debian-.*)@lists\.debian\.org" then
save $home/Mail/lists/$1/
finish
endif
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You can certainly do a lot more such as discarding junk mail that is
tagged or messages with "unsubscribe" in the subject. As you can see,
/var/mail/$USER isn't my "real" inbox.
Mutt will work out-of-the-box, but there is lots you can do to make it
better. The whole manual is at www.mutt.org and is quite easy to
read.
| -any thoughts, suggestions, are welcomed...
HTH,
-D
--
The crucible for silver and the furnace for gold,
but the Lord tests the heart.
Proverbs 17:3
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