On Sun, Feb 15, 2009 at 06:41:46PM +0000, James Freer wrote:
> Jan
>
> > I don't know about synaptic. But using "apt-get install mutt"
> > exim4 was installed automatically with mutt on my sytem. i was using exim
> >
> > what should I learn from this? better building mutt from the source?
>
> {Using Ubuntu 8.04
> I wanted to use mutt for coping with my mail for three email gmail
> accounts... mostly lists and yahoogroups for classic cars and other
> interests.}
Are you just trying to copy all your mail locally and you don't care
about viewing it through the webmail interface? If so then using
fetchmail or getmail as suggested is a good bet. But even if you use the
'keep on server' option, there will be a disparity between your local
copies and your remote copies.
fetchmail and getmail were designed with the Post Office Protocol (POP)
in mind. They are mainly ways of pulling email from the remote server;
they don't push any information back to the server (like if you've read
the email, or deleted it locally, or moved it to a different folder).
POP was designed to just be more like a Post Office Box where you
contact the server to pull down your email for local consumption
(deleteing them from the server).
If you want to use something that takes full advantage of the IMAP
protocol, you'll want to look into offlineimap which can sync
IMAP-server-to-IMAP-server and IMAP-server-to-Maildir. Unfortunately,
you can't run this through something like procmail or maildrop. But
this will keep the local state of your email and the remote state in
sync with each other. The only caveat is that if you create a new email
folder locally, it won't create a new folder on the IMAP server (or a
new label in the case of Gmail). You'll have to create new folders on
the IMAP server.
> a] re: exim I don't think so! On my main PC [as opposed to my test PC
> which is where i'm trying out mutt first] Exim is a DEFAULT install.
> From synaptic mutt installs without any dependencies which i was
> surprised at. Why the default install? i don't know - i wondered if it
> was for evolution [the default email client but doesn't seem to be].
Exim is part of the default install because in the olden days all of
your email was delivered to the 'mail spool' (usually
/var/mail/$USERNAME or /var/spool/mail/$USERNAME) and you read it from
there, possibly copying it to a local home directory (like ~/Mail/inbox
or something similar). Lots of command-line and backend programs relied
on this functionality, and sent things like error messages to your mail
spool. Many still do. For example, if you define a process to run in a
schedule on
cron, any output (either to STDOUT or STDERR) will be packaged into an
email an sent to your mailspool (the assumption being that any output
that isn't going to a log file is an error that you'll want to know
about).
> b] As i'm still trying to learn from much reading - what is the
> difference between?
> sssmtp [simple solution includes SSL]
> nbsmtp ['no-brainer' includes SSL
> esmtp [poor documentation not SSL
> msmtp [supports multiple accounts and SSL]
>
> Due to supporting multiple accounts it seems msmtp is the choice for
> me as it offers multiple account support. None of these will support
> queuing from what i can gather. As i'm intending to use gmail SSL is
> required... i don't know but i gathered that emails can be lost
> without SSL e.g yahoo only use port 110 and 25.
The problem with port 25 is that loads of ISPs are now blocking all
outgoing connections on port 25. This is due to the massive numbers of
their subscribers that have virus-infected boxes trying to send out spam
emails (i.e. spambot-nets). Port 587 work for normal SMTP as well as
SMTP w/ TLS IIRC. Gmail uses TLS over SMTP (TLS is just a way to start
an SSL connection over a normal connection, as opposed to using a
completely separate port for SSL-only connections).
> c] As i want to filter email to subject directories [maildir] i need
> to use postfix or maildrop. For a newbie the Postfix seems easier to
> set up or i can't find a decent doc on maildrop.
Are you wanting to do filtering beyond what you are doing with Gmail's
filtering? Or are you trying to subvert the web interface altogether?
This matters to answering your question.
> Be grateful if you could comment on my deliberations!!
>
> thanks
> james
--
Brandon Sandrowicz
email: bsand...@gmail.com
cell: +1 503 481 3865
