Project::Mail (small update)

Finally after some weeks of dragging myself of not doing anything really geekly worthwhile. Due to writing articles, pulling my weight in getting SlackBuilds.org ready for Slackware 12.0, interchanged with bouts of Second Life and general interviews, which left me a little bit exhausted and generally lethargic.

Anyway I have decided to finally pick up the slack a little bit and get on with my mail serving project.

To quickly recap: one of the things I have been thinking off for a while now is to set up an e-mail solution where it really doesn’t matter what MUA you use, you will always see the same mail you trust and love. Okay, each mua will probably need some minimal configuration to set up the mailboxen etc, but thats hopefully once. Then regardless of the way you log in, it should be good to run.

I have decided to concentrate on minimal the three following muas:

*- Kmail (KDE standard Mail client)

The reason for KMail is that is has been my mua for quite somewhile. It just works. This is and will probably remain my main mua for the foreseeable future.

*- Mutt (One of the best console clients around)

To have access to email when logging in remotely or for some reason, unable to run X is a nice feature.

*- Thunderbird (Mozzies renowned mail reader)

I actually quite like Thunderbird, but the fact that I can’t minimize it into the system tray is something that I find highly annoying.

As far as I can tell there are two ways to deal with the situation. One is to make sure that one all mua’s use the same mailbox format (ie. maildir or mbox). The other is to use IMAP. By having all mail centrally stored on the server it makes it a lot easier to sort out your email regardless of how/where I access my emails from.

Then there is always the point that I can always use something between solutions 1 and 2. I know already from experience that mutt and kmail can read each other mails as long as kmail writes the everything in mbox format [1]. So technically I could file away certain emails locally which probably will throw some mail clients out of the loop, but I think KMail and mutt are going to be the most important onces to deal with anyway.

So the next step is to really figure out how to get this all working. Considering I have atleast three email accounts from gmail, that need to be polled. So all in all it comes down to figuring out how to get that to work properly. I can foresee this leading to having to setup a whole emailserver solution.

I have decided to actually go into the way of running an imap server. Basically I an gonna follow Dominians MailServer Howto This means some extra figuring out that I need to do, but all in all should be fun [2].

So far I am still trying to get my head around about what I need to do first. But it seems to be heading this way:

1) Setup smpt and imap server
2) Setup getmail to download the email
3) Make sure getmail delivers them to the imapserver boxen
4) Other misc magic(tm) [3]
5) Hope it all works :)

Anyway back to more googling and reading and understanding .. which hopefully at some point will lead to enlightement :)

[1]: The biggest problem is that KMail doesn’t adhere standarly to the ‘purer’ definition of mbox format. In short, KMail allows “Mbox folders” which isn’t technically correct and mutt will have problems with that. It would be better if KMail would just create folders. Although I can understand that it may be harder to implement than I imagine.
[2]: For weird/geek definitions of fun ofcourse.
[3]: This ofcourse involves praying a lot to $DEITY and usual offerings of goats and virgins.