Email Aggregator with Fetchmail, Re-serviced by Dovecot
I’ve finally have my home email under control. At this point, my home email consists of 6 email addresses. I have my standard gmail account, and a mike@ email address for each domain I own. I needed someway of combining all my messages into one server. This makes it much easier to configure and control. Chess Griffin over at Linux Reality is due a large amount of credit for his recommendations in Episode 61 – Home Servers Part 7: Simple Email Server.
In order to gather all my email, I tossed Ubuntu 7.04 on a Dell Optiplex Gx1 (That’s 366MHz of pure processing power, folks!). In order to keep the mail from jamming up the whole root partition, I chose to make /var a separate partition during setup. I loaded the fetchmail package and began configuring. This step was probably the hardest. These instructions provided by gna.org were a great help in this step. After about 2 days of fishing through the man pages, I was able to get fetchmail functioning properly. A little suggestion in this step: If you have multiple accounts, add and test them one at time. It will save you a major headache.
The next step was to choose and email server from Chess Griffin’s recommendations. I came to the same conclusion he did. Dovecot works beautifully for this kind of project as an IMAP backend. The reason to choose IMAP for me was that their were several machines I wanted to check email on without having to go through each machine and guess which messages I had already read. (In fancy terms, I needed a Message Store, not just a mail server.) The Ubuntu Documentation Project was my next step to research Dovecot. I found this article and promptly had Dovecot running “smooth as butter”.
All in all, this was a successful project that I should have done a long time ago. The next logical step for me is to set this up at work for my five addresses there. This will greatly reduce my stress level and assure that I can check them all at the same time!
