[CLUE-Tech] imap, etc., help

[Mike Staver]

Collins Richey wrote:
> 
> OK, Mike, I'll belly up to the bar and ask for help. I've never
> worked with anything other than Sylpheed and (ouch!) OutHouse
> Express). Here's my setup and what I'd like to do. Your help will
> certainly be appreciated, and perhaps others will benefit as well.
> 
> 1. I have three machines
>     A gentoo desktop
>     A WinXP machine for the wife
>     A dual boot latop (WinXP and gentoo)
> 2. I'm on comcast with a netgear router and hard-wired ethernet lan.
> 3. I have three email accounts (actually four, but my daughter will be
> using that at college) - wife, me, and my real estate business account.
> 4. Right now, the WinXP box reads the wife's mail (OutHouse Express),
> the desktop reads my mail (Sylpheed), and the laptop boots to WinXP to
> read my real estate business mail(just because some of the real estate
> functions require windows) using Mozilla. 
> 5. All the mail accounts are POP3.
> 
> Here's what I would like to do:
> 
> 1. Unrelated to this, is it possible to add an additional wireless
> connection into the mix? My laptop has builtin wireless. 
> 
> 2. Retrieve all the mail on the desktop box and store as imap.

Ok, I think I get what you're saying - having all the mail downloaded 
over pop3 every so often and then stored on a server at your house, 
which you want to put IMAP on?  If so, I would think it could work 
something like this:

1) I've never used fetchmail before, but I think you can use it to 
download your pop3 messages every so often with a cron job and store 
them in mbox format on your server, probably somewhere like 
/var/spool/mail on a RedHat box. However, I think a better option if you 
have it is to have your mail forwarded from these other accounts to your 
new address. That way, SpamAssasin can filter it, as opposed to just 
grabbing it from the server, in which case I'm not sure how you could 
filter it for spam. My only concern here is your ComCast ISP problem - 
your IP isn't static, is it?  That could be the killer right there.

2) Use Sendmail (that's all I use and know, not saying it's the best, 
but I know it works) and set up a mail server, and make sure you install 
the IMAP package for your distro as well.  Also, if SpamAssasin is 
available for your distro, grab that as well, or get it from 
spamassasin.org.

3) Once you set up your mail server, install the webmail package of your 
choice and make sure you have the available ports open on the server, 
and if possible, through your cable modem to the outside world.

> 3. Add some spam filtering and virus trashing (since some of the mail is
> destined for WinXP).

With the help of this list, I have learned to configure procmail and 
SpamAssassin for this very use.  As for antivirus - I haven't really 
gone there yet, but with procmail, I did this:

:0 B
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(vbs|scr|pif|com|bat|dll|exe)"
/dev/null

That outta take care of most of it :)  I don't ever plan on getting 
executable windows programs in my email, and if somebody did send it to 
me, it would be a stupid forward, and I don't want it anyways!  The one 
thing that doesn't cover is zip files, which can be bad from time to time.

> 4. Retrieve mail from imap on any machine using a browser interface.

You'll have to be running a webmail client on your server, and I noticed 
  Chris Tubutis sent out a nice list of available webmail clients.  I 
would like to add my favorite to this, Basilix which can be found here:

http://www.basilix.org/index.php?lang=en

> 5. Eventually have an encrypted interface to allow the latop to use the
> browser interface from outside my lan. Maybe this isn't possible with
> the comcast contract?

Yeah, I have no idea about Comcast, but if your IP isn't static, this 
might be tough.  I have DSL with Viawest as an ISP for this very reason.

> 6. Have the same setup ready to go as backup on the laptop.

So, you'd want 2 servers? You lost me at this step.

-- 

                                 -Mike Staver
                                  staver at fimble.com
                                  mstaver at globaltaxnetwork.com