Re: Should I Abandon Mutt and Exim4?

[Gregory Seidman <gsslist+debian@anthropohedron.net>]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 06:20:04PM -0500, Dan Martins wrote:
[...]
} Hi, I JUST finished setting up mail using fetchmail/procmail/exim4/mutt. 
} What a pain! I found this website very helpful: 
} http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~lativyn/articles/debian-mutt/
} If found all of the other articles i came across were too complicated to 
} just get things working on a single user PC.
} 
} Now that I have it working i'm glad i spent the time on it.

Wow, really? I have things set up with three fetchmail accounts (two go to
my mailboxes, one to my wife's), exim4, procmail, spamc/spamd, and
courier-imap. Of those, the hard parts (in order of difficulty) were:

1) procmail -- I still don't properly understand how to write my own
               recipes; all of mine are cut and paste or modified from cut
               and paste

2) exim4 w/ maildir -- This took some digging to figure out, but it's a
                       matter of the line I mentioned in the previous post
                       in the /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf and running
                       update-exim4.conf && /etc/init.d/exim4 reload. The
                       line is: dc_localdelivery='maildir_home'

3) courier-imap auth -- I didn't want to use my login password for IMAP, so
                        I used authuserdb. This just involved the userdb*
                        commands from courier-imap and changing the
                        /etc/courier/authdaemonrc to use authuserdb.

4) mutt config -- I copied someone else's and gradually customized it. I'm
                  using m4 cleverness for mailing list subscriptions.

5) spamassassin user_prefs -- I shouldn't discount this, since I had
                              developed it over the course of years on a
                              system someone else administered, but it was
                              incremental improvements.

6) /etc/fetchmailrc -- Building the fetchmailrc, especially figuring out
                       how to make sure that it wouldn't overwhelm
                       spamassassin or exim4, was a little challenging. I
                       used fetchmailconf for it, though, so it was
                       moderately easy.

7) debconf -- Using debconf to make exim4 use a smarthost was dead easy.

8) software install -- apt-get install, baby!
                       spamassassin procmail fetchmail courier-imap mutt

There are some embellishments, such as having three accounts with the same
UID so that I can receive mail to root on one, mail to my private address
on another, and mail to my mailing list address on another, each of which
are separate maildirs that mutt considers mail spools. I could do it with
procmail, I think, but it's easier (if not simpler) to do it with three
accounts.

--Greg