The perfect email setup… for me
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007Email has always been a problem for me. Using web interfaces is a pain. Even the new JavaScript, single-page apps nowadays are bloated and slow. You can’t compare them to evolution, thunderbird or even outlook 
Most Email Service Providers (ESPs) do provide POP3, but POP3 doesn’t support folders and is not a good option if you would like to access your mail from multiple locations.
So what is the solution? IMAP or the Internet Message Access Protocol gives me all the features I need:
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Multiple clients simultaneously connected to the same mailbox
I check my email from my Desktop, Laptop and PC at Uni.
-
supports folders
can’t live without them. I don’t believe in labels, and virtual folders. I want to physically partition my mail.
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Read/Write Support2-way SynchronizationI am not sure what this is really called but you know how POP3 supports downloading only? Well with IMAP you can upload emails to you mailbox. This also allows you to copy emails between folders or even accounts. It also allows you to do things like have your sent mail folder in your mailbox and have all your clients upload the sent mail there.
So what is the problem then? Most ESPs do not support IMAP. My old ESP (gawab.com) did, but due to the stability issues of gawab, I had to look elseware.
Now I didn’t get your hopes up just to let you down! Remember that $5/month VPS I have? It is time to get some more use out of it!
The plan is to have an IMAP server on my VPS, I don’t want to have the responsibility of running a my own SMTP server, just the IMAP server. I would also like to consolidate my email addresses into one mailbox. This seams like a simple plan.. a good one too, if I don’t say so my self
Solving the SMTP Issue
So I don’t want the responsibility of running a SMTP server so I will pass the buck to google. Google Apps provides email for your domain so you don’t have to worry about 99.99% availability and all that.
Installing and Configuring the IMAP Server
I decided on Dovecot for the IMAP server because of it’s low memory footprint as well as it’s stability and good reputation.
in ubuntu all I needed was to:
apt-get install dovecot-imapd
I wanted to set up IMAP over SSL for better security so I needed to create a SSL certificate
cd /etc/ssl openssl genrsa 1024 > private/domain.key chmod 400 private/domain.key openssl req -new -x509 -nodes -sha1 -days 365 -key private/domain.key > certs/domain.cert
I new that I planned to use a passwd like password file for authentication so I created one right away:
cat >>/etc/dovecot/passwd < <EOF user@domain:{plain}password EOF
Then you need to configure dovecot by editing /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf
protocols = imaps
## Logging
log_timestamp = "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S "
## SSL settings
ssl_cert_file = /etc/ssl/certs/domain.cert
ssl_key_file = /etc/ssl/private/domain.key
## Login processes
login_user = dovecot
## Mailbox locations and namespaces
mail_location = maildir:/var/lib/mail/%d/%n
mail_extra_groups = mail
## Mail processes
first_valid_uid = 107
last_valid_uid = 107
## IMAP specific settings
protocol imap {
login_greeting_capability = yes
}
## Authentication processes
auth_debug = yes
auth_debug_passwords = yes
auth default {
mechanisms = plain
user = root
passdb passwd-file {
# Path for passwd-file
args = /etc/dovecot/passwd
}
userdb static {
args = uid=dovecot gid=mail domain=domain home=/var/lib/mail/%d/%u
}
}
## Dictionary server settings
plugin {
}That’s all
Consolidating my Email Accounts
I expected to have to learn the mysteries of fetchmail but I was lucky to find getmail4, a simpler replacement.
apt-get install getmail4 mkdir /etc/getmail chown -R dovecot:mail /etc/getmail
create a getmailrc file /etc/getmail/domain-user that describes the retrieval and delivery phases
It will look something like:
[retriever] type = SimplePOP3SSLRetriever server = pop.gmail.com username = user@domain port = 995 password = your_password [destination] type = Maildir path = /var/lib/mail/domain/user/ [options] delete = false verbose = 0 delete_after = 0 read_all = false
test it with:
sudo -u dovecot getmail --getmaildir=/etc/getmail --rcfile=/etc/getmail/domain-user
if all is OK then create a cron job to run say every 15 minutes
# Crontab for getmail. Download mail every 15 minutes 0,15,30,45 * * * * dovecot getmail --getmaildir=/etc/getmail --rcfile=/etc/getmail/domain1-user1 5,20,35,50 * * * * dovecot getmail --getmaildir=/etc/getmail --rcfile=/etc/getmail/domain2-user2
And there you have it! Just one nifty IMAP mailbox that contains all you email from all your accounts.
