Hotmail + pop3 -> hotway

[schutten]

I've been looking into a solution to get my hotmail with any pop3 email client.

The gotmail package does not seem to work anymore (haven't actually tried it, but that is what the homepage http://ssl.usu.edu/paul/gotmail/ seems to say). Also the maintainer of gotmail suggests to switch to a new package called hotway (http://people.freenet.de/courierdave/).

So I tried that.
In my enthusiastic (sp?) spirit I decided to make an ebuild for that package...

That's more or less done (it compiles & installs now, some quirks: tar.gz file end with -r2, which conflicts in some way with the way portage works; also the default make install of the package is somewhat broken; but thats's all solved now...)
Only thing left is how to install the daemon...
I should add the scripts that go into /etc/init.d & xinet configuration files.

The documentation of hotway only speaks of inetd, and we don't have that (apparenly we've got xinetd). I don't know much (=nothing) about inetd/xinetd, so I'll need some help there.

Last night was already late, so I stopped when I couldn't get it to work very quickly (tried to look at other ebuilds that install daemons, but couldn't really find one quickly that looked similar to hotway).

So can someone give some hints? The hotway daemon is installed at /usr/sbin/hotwayd. It does not seem to have any commandline options, so it needs to get the port setting (port 110 (pop3) or a user defined one) via somewhere else. The documentation only mentions lines to go into inetd config files & /etc/services. How to convert these to a gentoo setup?

Oh, when the ebuild is finished & working, I'll submit it to be included into portage

[rac]

Have a look at the net-mail/qpopper ebuild. It sounds like it would be very similar to your situation.
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[schutten]

Well I managed to solve this, thanks rac that was a good hint!

I was completely wrong:
- first of all I did not even have the xinetd package installed yet...
- also the hotway daemon only requires a config file for xinetd, I was trying to add a file to /etc/init.d...

Yes, it was very late yesterday, so I wasn't thinking clearly anymore.

As promised I submitted the ebuild to be included into the portage tree (my first!)

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8014

So anyone that needs access to his/her hotmail account (who doesn't have a hotmail account ?) can use this package. If you can't wait for this to be in the official portage tree one can download the ebuild via the link above (newly submitted ebuilds are bug reports...). The current portage tree supports a 2nd local portage tree, this is also what I use. Works great!

BTW I had to attach the file with mime type set to plain/text (like the instructions do say), but that behaves funny in combination with mozilla... Anyway I downloaded the attachment (via Save Link Target As), and if you manually type in the correct name (hotway.tgz) all is well...

Have fun!

[rizzo]

[schutten]

Yes, with this program it is for free

This program uses the same protocol as outllook express (this protocol (httpmail) is an invention of microsoft and therefore only supported in some of their products) to fetch your email, and presents the messsages as a pop3 server.

Note that this only fetches your emails. As far as I know there is no way yet to send messages with your hotmail account using a regular email program (one would have to write a smtp -> httpmail convertor I guess).
You'll have to have another email account somewhere to send messages, but the current solution is good enough for me...
One can always set the "reply-to" field in your outgoing messages if you want answers back to your hotmail account.

[mallchin]

Yeah, this program roxx.

I was using gotmail but this is a much more elegant solution.
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