Running a POP or IMAP client on a LAN

[dsr at tao.merseine.nu]

On Mon, Jan 10, 2005 at 11:54:02AM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> In general, my local system simply drops email into /var/spool/mail. 
> However, I may want to grab email for my wife where I would need to run a 
> POP3 or IMAP client. 
> Both dovecot, courier-imap and cyrus-imap server both POP3 and IMAP, and 
> Qpopper serves POP3. I'm not concerned about security, but I might tie this 
> into SPAMD later. 
> 
> I am only going to configure 1 client inside my private LAN. I'll use smtp 
> and fetchmail to get her email from the outside world. 
> 
> So, my real question is the ease of setting one of these up, and the 
> reliability. I'm not concerened about security because all the access is 
> local to my LAN. 

If I understand you correctly, you're going to setup fetchmail
to get her email from a foreign system(s), then hold it locally
until she picks it up from inside the LAN. (Presumably you think
the outside systems are unreliable to some degree.)

If that's the case, the simplest and easiest thing to set up is
a POP3 server that reads /var/spool/mail.

cyrus-imap stores mail in its own format.
courier-imap prefers mail stored in maildirs.

dovecot is probably a good choice here.

It's not what I do, though.

First, I keep mail in maildirs. They're the most reliable
mail-spool format available.

Second, I run IMAP/SSL to the outside world. That way, I can
read mail securely anywhere.

Third, when I have a need to pick up mail from a foreign server,
I use getmail http://www.qcc.ca/~charlesc/software/getmail-4/
rather than fetchmail. I got tired of having simple
configurations exhibit buggy behavior.

-dsr-

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