For a long time I’ve wanted a better home office e-mail system and I finally had some free time to set it up. It took a while. The information and tools are all freely available. But they are distributed in many different places and it’s difficult to find stuff when you don’t know what to look for. So I’m documenting my set-up here for future reference.<\/p>\n
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The first feature I wanted was to collect mail from multiple service provider accounts. My main account is on Google Mail<\/a> but I’ve had others over the years and I also maintain a separate account for gamecontractor.org<\/a>. I was tempted to forward all my mail to Google Mail and manage everything through a web browser. But I wanted a little more control over my data. In particular, I wanted more control over spam, archiving, and searching.<\/p>\n To collect my mail I found 2 programs that did what I wanted: fetchmail<\/a> and getmail<\/a>. I chose getmail because it seemed better documented and supported. The scripts to set-up getmail are even easy to read. Here’s my Google Mail script: .getmail\/getmailrc-1:<\/p>\n [destination] [options] Mail collected by this script is delivered directly to my Maildir<\/a> folder. Maildir is one of the two most popular email storage formats (the other is mbox<\/a>) and I chose it because it seemed more robust and easier to configure.<\/p>\n I have one of these scripts for each account and type of mail I need to collect. But getmail doesn’t collect my mail automatically. Each time I must run the getmail program with this script:<\/p>\n
\n[retriever]
\ntype = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
\nserver = imap.googlemail.com
\nusername = ***
\npassword = ***
\nmailboxes = (\"INBOX\", )<\/p>\n
\ntype = Maildir
\npath = ~\/Maildir\/<\/p>\n
\nread_all = false
\nmessage_log = ~\/.getmail\/log
\ndelete = true
\n<\/code><\/p>\n
\ngetmail -r getmailrc-1
\n<\/code><\/p>\n