On Sat, 17 May 2003, Nicos Gollan wrote:
> I'm looking for a way to have my mail on a central server, possibly an IMAP
> server so that I can access it from multiple machines without having to
> manually shuffle the data between them. I had a short look at cyrus21, but I
> didn't find something I'm looking for.
I really like talking about my email system. So, without further ado:
I have three external email accounts I check. One is at work, one is
at my ISP, and one is at hotmail.
Fetchmail handles the ISP and work pop3 accounts. Gotmail handles the
hotmail account. Both are set up as cron jobs, and both forward any
email to exim.
Exim handles the incoming email, and sends it to procmail for the final
delivery.
Procmail sends it to bogofilter, then sorts it into the appropriate
mail folders, such as 'MaybeSpam' or 'debian-user'. Any email that
doesn't have a presorted folder ends up in the INBOX. All my emails are
in Maildir format. Although Maildir isn't strictly necessary for
IMAP, it makes things easier.
So, now all my email is on my local server, presorted, filtered, and
the such. However, I want to be able to access it from the desktop,
as well as the laptop. So, courier-imap goes on the machine, and is
configured so it only listens on the local network device. Congrats,
mozilla on the desktop has no problems now.
However, I like to take my laptop with me and read email. Instead of
simply allowing mutt to read my email via IMAP, I use offlineimap to
syncronize my email box between my desktop and my laptop. That allows
me to read offline and propagate my changes when I reconnect.
Since bogofilter works best with continual training, I have two IMAP
folders: "Spam" and "NotSpam". At midnight, a script goes through each
folder, mail by mail, and reclassifies them for bogofilter before
deleting them.
Finally, another script ends up going through debian-user once a week
and deleting all email over a week old. (I love you guys, but the sheer
amount of email this list has can start to kill email boxes.) I suppose
you could always archive it, but google groups archives this mailing
list and they tend to have rather good search facilities. :)
Oh, exim on the server and the laptop are set up as smart hosts, the
laptop forwards to the server, and the server forwards to the ISP's
smtp server.
In short:
fetchmail and gotmail for retrieving email, exim, procmail, and
bogofilter for filtering email, courier-imap to interface with the
client machines, offlineimap to syncronize files between the server and
laptop.
Or, if your lazy, you could always use fetchmail and exim, and just
access the server via ssh and read your email using mutt. :)
--
...crying "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"... ~ HPL
icq : 34583382 | === ascii ribbon campaign ===
msn : dasunt@hotmail.com | () - against html mail
yim : tsunad | /\ - against proprietary attachments
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