[Linux-disciples] Fetchmail and Postfix

Adam Rosi-Kessel adam at rosi-kessel.org
Sun Jul 25 08:47:23 EDT 2004


On Sun, Jul 25, 2004 at 08:12:28AM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> If a friend wanted to download his mail from my machine, he
> couldn't use fetchmail, because as of now I don't have a POP
> or IMAP server. (I might get one anyway, though.) What
> should he use in that case? Should he just write a cron job
> to rsync /var/mail/[username] every 5 minutes or so?

A "friend," eh?  Is this like my "friend" who is just wondering where you
find pornography on the Internet?

rsync'ing /var/mail/username sounds like a bad idea to me.  rsync won't
wait for a lock, so you have a good chance of getting half-delivered
emails.  Also, for it to make any sense at all, the user would have to
*delete* /var/mail/username after each download (in which case scp would
make a lot more sense than rsync) or else you're going to get duplicates
with each download (i.e., the user receives their mail, then files some
of it in various folders, but then receives it again and gets all those
messages that were moved out of the inbox back again).

Basically, what you're asking is how someone can do offline mail reading
without having an offline mail server.  I would just install an IMAP
server and then they can add

poll laniels.org with proto imap:
      plugin "ssh -2 %h /usr/sbin/imapd" auth ssh;

to their .fetchmailrc and it will be done.  Most IMAP servers work
entirely out-of-the-box--just apt-get install and you're done.

I'm currently using dovecot which supports IMAP{,S} and/or POP3{,s} and
has a simple, easy to understand config file.  You might also try the
more standard uw-imapd or cyrus-imapd, which are probably a little more
thoroughly tested.  dovecot probably takes fewer resources.
-- 
Adam Rosi-Kessel
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org
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