Re: mutt + dovecot/squirrelmail + mbox ?
On 2005-06-05, Lee Braiden penned:
> On Sunday 05 Jun 2005 05:51, Monique Y. Mudama wrote:
>> So I finally bit the bullet and installed IMAP so that I could use
>> one of the non-openwebmail webmails. Squirrelmail's docs make a
>> big point of how if you're running mbox and don't make sure the
>> locking mechanisms are well-coordinated, you run a risk of turning
>> your mailboxes into hamburger.
>
> I'm not entirely sure of what you're trying to do here.
Good point. I wasn't exactly clear, was I?
For the last few years, I've been running mutt directly on my mail
server to access mbox-formatted mail.
I adore mutt, but there are a few situations when webmail is handy.
Sometimes I don't have the time to install and configure an ssh client
on the machine to which I have access, for example. Sometimes I get an
email with a lot of links, and I'd like to just middle-click and open
them in new tabs. Stuff like that. So for a while now, I've been using
openwebmail, which is mildly annoying but did the job without requiring
IMAP or MailDir.
Now it seems that openwebmail isn't considered to be all that great,
has lots of security vulnerabilities and IIRC is no longer being
maintained as a Debian package. So I had a look around.
Squirrelmail seems to be extremely popular as a webmail client, so I
went with that. I chose Dovecot because it seemed pretty light-weight
and simple.
So, to summarize, I mostly want to use mutt to access my mail
directly on the server, but every now and then I also want to view my
mail using a web client. I have screen running all the time, so mutt
will almost certainly be open to my inbox when I open up the webmail
client.
> But if you just need IMAP functionality for some web interface, and
> want it to be fast and lock-safe, then there's another option: dbmail.
>
> It'll store mails in a mysql database for you (postgresql too, but it
> seems to be optimised for mysql). Shouldn't be any access issues,
> since dbmail's IMAP interface and its own client utilities do all the
> access. Chances are, if you're running web stuff, you'll be using
> mysql anyway.
>
> The only downside is that you lose direct access to the files, so
> running spamassassin on your spam folder becomes a lot harder, *if*
> you want to keep your spam folder in IMAP too, that is.
Yeah, that's just not going to work for me. IMAP is really just a
means to the end of webmail for me, but webmail is only a secondary
concern; I need to be able to run mutt, and being able to use grepmail
and similar utilities is also pretty important.
> Anyone have a script for processing remote IMAP folders with
> spamassassin, by the way? ;)
Good luck with that!
--
monique
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