5/4/2007

The Problem: E-mail Style

Cardoe wrote this in the early evening:

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

3 Responses to “The Problem: E-mail Style”

  1. Tim Harder Says:
    May 4th, 2007 at 11:03 pm

    Another choice for server side filtering is using the sieve plugin for dovecot which can be installed via the sieve use flag. I am currently using it on a similar setup of my own.

    See these websites for more details:
    http://wiki.dovecot.org/LDA/Sieve
    http://sieve.info/

    Tim

  2. Bob McDonald Says:
    May 4th, 2007 at 11:33 pm

    I’m in the process of installing a postfix/dovecot server under gentoo. Although there is an in progress howto already on the web, I’d be uinterested in hearing any thoughts you have for installing this.

    Regards,

    Bob

  3. deadhead Says:
    May 5th, 2007 at 4:17 am

    Hi cardoe, why don’t you take a look at getmail [http://pyropus.ca/software/getmail/documentation.html#features] this could save you a lot of time, reducing the entropy of the entire mail system.

    Btw I hope this will become soon a Gentoo Doc, I’ll be pleased to translate it ;)

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