[ILUG] IMAPS - almost but not quite ...

[Francis Daly]

On 05/09/07, Timothy Murphy <gayleard at eircom.net> wrote:

Hi there,

first off: there are lots of ways to configure mail; and one of the
best ways of sending incoming mail into the void of the bitbucket is
to randomly mess with .procmailrc without testing carefully. So if
your current setup works well enough for the duration of this trip,
you may be better off sticking with it and adjusting things when you
have more time and access to the machine to fix any new brokenness.

That said:

> On my laptop, I have an IMAPS account pointing to my server.

Your laptop checks your imap(s) server for mail.

> mail_location = maildir:~/Mail/inbox

Your imap server serves whatever mail it finds in that location.

> On the server kmail has 2 Accounts;
> A Local account, which collects mail from /var/spool/mail/tim ,
> and an IMAPS account, which points to itself, as www.gayleard.com .
> New mail goes into IMAPS/inbox (I'm not sure why).

That looks very like kmail will read stuff from /var/spool/mail/tim,
and put it into IMAPS/inbox, which seems to be the same ~/Mail/inbox
that the imap server serves from.

So new incoming mail to your machine goes to /var/spool/mail/tim by
some mechanism; after kmail runs, it is in the place that the imap
server looks and your imap client can then see.

> On the server, .procmailrc contains the lines
>
>         MAILDIR=$HOME/Mail
>         DEFAULT=/var/spool/mail/tim
>         DROPPRIVS=yes

And procmail is almost certainly the mechanism by which new incoming
mail gets put into /var/spool/mail/tim.

So if you reconfigure procmail to instead put new mail into the place
the imap server looks directly, then your imap client will see it
immediately.

In procmailrc, MAILDIR is "the current directory, and relative paths
are relative to this". DEFAULT is "unless a rule puts mail elsewhere,
put it here". If that's your complete procmailrc, then there are no
other rules, and so everyting goes into /var/spool/mail/tim -- which
matches what you observe.

My "man procmailrc" says

If the mailbox name ends in "/", then this directory is presumed to be
a maildir folder; i.e., procmail will deliver the message to a file in
a subdirectory  named "tmp" and rename it to be inside a subdirectory
named "new".

which suggests that just changing your serverside .procmailrc to have the line

DEFAULT=inbox/

instead of the current DEFAULT line should be enough.

Procmail typically runs when necessary, and so will pick up the config
file change the next time it is necessary.

> Any advice or suggestions gratefully received.

1) Do nothing, and be happy works, albeit not smoothly.

2) edit .procmailrc, send a mail to yourself, and if the laptop
doesn't see it soon enough, undo the change you made, hope you lost no
other mail in that time, and revert to (1).

Good luck,

	f