Re: [Sheflug] Web based e-mail setup

[Richard Ibbotson <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From: david@xxxxxxxxxxxx
   To: sheflug@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   Date: Today 20:34:54
    
 >
 >
 >> -----Original Message-----
 >> From: sheflug-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
 >> [mailto:sheflug-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of david
 >> Sent: 02 April 2007 09:38
 >> To: Sheflug
 >> Subject: [Sheflug] web-based email setup
 >>
 >> Dear All
 >>
 >> I'd like to setup an email server on a home server so that I
 >> can manage emails on it via a web browser either at home (on
 >> different machines) or remotely. At the moment I use
 >> evolution to get emails from various accounts
 >> (david.willington@xxxxxxxxxxxx and a couple of others). I'd
 >> like to retrieve these every 10 minutes or so to a server at
 >> home and store and manage them on the server. I think what I
 >> need is an imap server and something like squirrel mail but
 >> I'm very vague on this whole area. Can someone point me in
 >> the right direction please?
 >
 > I use Courier and Squirel to do just that. Courier has it's own
 > (sqwebmail) web interface, but squirrel is nicer! Sqwebmail is cgi,
 > Squirrel is php - that may affect your decision. The overall solution
 > may be a bit heavyweight for what you want though, but it works for me.
 > The only other thing you'd need if your ISP isn't delivering SMTP
 > message in to you is something like fetchmail or getmail. I use
 > fetchmail, but getmail would also work. Fetchmail delivers by smtp
 > injection back into your own server; getmail can process messages
 > straight into Maildir format. Depending on your configuration for
 > outgoing mail, you may not actually need anything other than sendmail
 > and an IMAP server with getmail. getmail is written in python. I think
 > fetchmail is C.
 >
 > I run fetchmail in daemon mode, checking mailboxes every 5 minutes. It
 > kicks off @reboot from a cron file.
 >
Thanks for the pointers. I'm replying using pretty much the same setup
you've described, so fingers crossed. Outgoing email is now being sent
direct from postfix on my own machine rather than via my isp, emails 
are getting picked up by fetchmail and accessed via squirrel mail and 
dovecot. I hadn't realised how fiddly email is until I started trying 
to set this up.

I'd tried to setup evolution so that the .evolution directory was 
mounted as an nfs share by whichever machine I was using, but I've had 
no end of problems with user permissions and lock files that I can't 
track down. Fingers crossed this'll be more reliable.

All the best

David

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