[solved] local IMAP server, best way for a single user?

[avx]

So after ~15 years of using email, I admit I still don't fully understand everything working behind the scenes and I'd like to request some help.

Currently I'm having various accounts related to my domains (normal webspace in this case, ie no v-/root), plus some gmail, plus work. My provider only offers me a simple webui, which I can use to fool around with spamassassin to decide what's ham and what's spam, but that's it - I can create (imap) folders, but I can't create rules to move messages.

Since I want to be somewhat free in choosing the clients I use, I thought about running a local IMAP server and feeding it via fetch-/procmail/fdm/etc.

I had a quick look at the documentation of courier and dovecot, but I found it to be not quite as easy to understand as I'd like it to be.

Basically, I want something like this:
remote server* -> fetch* -> filter* -> maildirs* -> local imap -> client* -> msmpt/something -> remote server*

Everything with a * is clear to me, but I don't know what best to use for the other stuff, so some help is appreciated.
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[Etal]

I don't have an internal IMAP server anymore (I just use mutt on the maildir :P) but I've previously set up courier-imap, and it was extremely easy.

All you have to do is edit the config file to set the correct path to maildirs, make it listen only to localhost, and reduce the number of processes. I guess the only tricky part was to make sure your maildirs are in a proper hierarchy for IMAP. (If you don't want to change the actual layout, you can just use a separate directory for imap, with symlinks to the right places.)

For sending, I use msmtp. It's nice because you can use it with different email accounts - it looks at the From address, and matches it to the right SMTP server. You can set it as the "sendmail command" in the email client.
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“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

[s_bernstein]

I'm having a similar setup like you want to build. For the reason was that I was tired of setting up all my email accounts and email filters on various computers and notebooks. So now I use getmail to fetch all the mail from the different mail servers (wrote a little script that will scan all user home folder for getmail setup files). Then I user maildrop to sort the mails into different imap folders. For the imap server I use dovecot, but I guess you can use any imap server you want.

I also wrote a little init-script which will insert and remove the cron job to fetch mail every x minutes.

[avx]

s_bernstein, would you mind showing me your dovecot-config, maybe I'll understand it better when it's just a simple config and not some of the complex stuff on their homepage.

Mutt & maildirs directly would be nice, but I can't be certain to always have a system in front of me, allowing to use ssh to go back to my server, so once I made sure it's running the way I want it, I think putting something like squirrel/roundcube on top would be rather easy for that situations.
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[s_bernstein]

Sure, but it's really quite straight forward. The config files for gentoo are well documented and almost self explaining. I didn't do any big changes. These things I changed compared to the default setup:

In dovecot.conf (only support imap and ipv4):

• protocols = imap
  
• listen = *
  

In conf.d/10-auth.conf (disable plaintext auth and set auth mode):

• disable_plaintext_auth = yes
  
• auth_mechanisms = plain login
  
• !include auth-system.conf.ext
  

In conf.d/10-mail.conf (setup mail folder and privileges):

• mail_location = maildir:/var/spool/mail/%u
  
• mail_privileged_group = mail
  

In conf.d/10-ssl.conf (Enable ssl):

• ssl = yes
  
• ssl_cert = </etc/ssl/dovecot/server_cert.pem
  
• ssl_key = </etc/ssl/dovecot/server_key.pem
  

But in general, dovecot should run just fine in the defautl config.

[avx]

So basically I did just the same as you, except for the mail_privileged_group (for now) and I set the location to be maildir:/%h/%u/.maildir.

For testing, I added the account data (localhost, imap, $user, $pwd) in claws-mail, which according to the log connects successfully, but it doesn't show any mail
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[s_bernstein]

You can't have any email in you imap folder unless you receive emails. So, if you do not want to setup a full featured mail server (which will be troublesome for various reasons on a dial-in connection) you now need something to collate your mails from your "real" mail server. I use getmail for this. The thing about getmail is, that you can fetch mails by varoius protocols like imap or pop or fetchmail. You could even fetch multiple accounts on one server with one call of getmail, although I never tried that.

[avx]

It's not that the .maildir is empty, I used `fdm` (sort of fetch/proc-mail combined) to fetch some mail from my server and it correctly stored them, ie there are now INBOX/{cur,new,tmp} + some other boxes in the maildir, I can look/read through them via ie `less` - so that should not be the problem.
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[s_bernstein]

If your content is correct, you - or better dovecot - is lacking the right permissions to read,write and execute on these dirs.

[avx]

Don't think so, I already tried `chmod -R 777 ~/.maildir` - no change. Even if that would be the case, shouldn't there be anything related to it in the logs?

Edit, closing claws, reopening it at clicking the inbox gives the following in network-log:

[s_bernstein]

Seems alright for me up until

[avx]

Ah damn, it's just been a typo, had Inbox instead of inbox.

Claws now picks up 'inbox' correctly, now to find out, how to also make the other maildirs available (~/.maildir/{inbox,foo,bar,baz}) since claws doesn't pick them up automatically.
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++++++++++[>+++++++>++++++++++>+++>+<<<<-]>++.>+.+++++++..+++.>++.<<+++++++++++++++.>.+++.------.--------.>+.>.

[Etal]

For courier-imap, at least, you have to put your other folders as dot-folders, inside your inbox folder. So if your inbox is in ~/Maildir/{cur,new,tmp}, you'd have ~/Maildir/.Sent/{cur,new,tmp}, etc.
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“And even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.”– Hillary Clinton, Jan. 21, 2010

[avx]

Thank you, that's the hint I needed
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