Doug Goldstein

Currently my e-mail is setup with my @gentoo.org, @php.net, and @users.sourceforge.net pointing to an account on cardoe.com that I separately use as well. This account is only accessible via POP3 and doesn’t have any anti-spam running. The only anti-spam I get is from my Gentoo e-mail forwards since infra set that up.

The idea is I want to make this e-mail accessible for myself via work or via home. Or if I’m traveling I want to be able to ssh into my machine and use Mutt. The solution for this is to use IMAP. I have decided to use dovecot since it’s relatively easy to setup, secure and a decent IMAP server. Plus it just recently hit 1.0.

Since I’m subscribed to several mailing lists and get my assorted share of bugzilla spam, I want to use IMAP folders to sort my mail into different categories. The most optimal solution would be to do server side sorting of my e-mail so for this purpose I have chosen maildrop. While procmail is always the popular choice for this, I find it’s Perl syntax to be quite obtuse. In all my years, I’ve never been a fan of Perl and have only used it when forced or left with no other alternatives. Like I can be seen saying on many IRC channels, Perl is WORN to me. Write Once, Read Never.

Now to bring the mail from distant servers to maildrop, I need another application. For this step I’ve chosen fetchmail simply because it’s configuration is fairly simple and it’s the most common app for this.

Lastly, for spam filtering I have chosen dspam since it’s a nice tightly integrated spam solution that provides an anti-spam solution that exceeds SpamAssassin once it’s been properly trained. As a failover, I will possibly configure SpamAssassin to hand hold dspam until it’s achieved it’s proper training. Plus, who can argue pretty web graphics with regard to spam to ham ratios.

I plan on doing a multi-part series about this setup since I think it’s something that people would like to do and I can never really find adequate HOWTO coverage of it. Granted I had already set this configuration up once, a day before my system’s hard drive completely died and I lost the configs since I had never backed them up. Shame on me. However, I’d happily take any suggestions people have and integrate all this into my series of articles, which hopefully can become a doc hosted in Gentoo’s doc space (/me pokes nightmorph)

Filed under: General, Linux
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