Re: Need Help Configuring LAN for Email

From: Nigel Wade (nmw_at_ion.le.ac.uk)
Date: 10/06/04 

Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 12:07:45 +0100

Mark Hobley wrote:

>> In message <a4ii22-jdd.ln1@charon.markhobley.yi.org>, Mark Hobley
>> <markhobley@hotpop.deletethisbit.com> writes
>> I want to be able to read the email held on the server from a remote
client
>> machine.
> I am now receiving mail on the server.
>
> The server uses retchmail to retrieve the email from the internet. Exim on
the
> server delivers mail to /home/mark/Mailbox on the server.
>
> I have installed courier-imap on the server from a Debian package. This
just
> installed and ran, it didn't ask me any questions, and I haven't done any
> configuration.

Courier reads maildir format mailboxes. That is, one message per file, with
messages stored in directories new/, cur/, tmp/ within each mailbox. The
default location is ~/Maildir, which is your inbox, with other mailboxes
being ~/Maildir/.folder.mailbox where .folder is an IMAP "directory" which
contains mailboxes and .folder.mailbox is a mailbox (i.e. real directory)
containing messages (i.e. new/,cur/,tmp/).

To get exim to deliver to this type of mailbox you use the appendfile
transport and specify "maildir_format" and set
directory=/home/$local_part/Maildir
assuming your home directory is in /home and your destination email address
is the same as your login id.

To deliver to other folders, in the relevent appendfile transport set
create_directory and directory=/home/$local_part/Maildir/.folder.mailbox

>
> From the client computer, I can telnet the server imap2 port. This gives
some
> sort of mail server session, so the imap server looks like it is running.
>
>> I want to use the "mutt" mail client on the remote machine.
>
> I have created a .muttrc file on the client computer as follows:
>
> set folder=imap://charon/Maildir
>
> (here charon is the name of the mail server as defined in /etc/hosts.)
>
> (This is what some people have advised. I have also tried:
> set folder=imap://charon/home/mark/Maildir but that didn't work either.)
>
> Do I need the /home/mark bit ?

I can't get the .muttrc folder=whatever to work, but I can get mutt to
connect to my imap server's default mailbox with the command:
$ mutt -f imap://our.mail.server/

To get to other mailboxes I can use the namespace as above:

mutt -f imap://our.mail.server/INBOX.folder.mailbox 

-- 
Nigel Wade

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