This is really cool: Instead of storing your e-mail in one application (such as KMail, or Mozilla-Mail) I can access my mail in various ways.. (even webmail in the future)
The short story is: I got myself my own digital mail-office ;-)
This is what I did:
fetching e-mail
- My pop3 will be downloaded by fetchmail every hour (with a cron-job)
- Hotmail will be downloaded too, and when KMess (MSN) receives a "new mail" event, the kde notification center also runs the hotmail-download program.
processing e-mail
- Then the messages will be forwared to my local MTA (mail transfer agent), ie. my postfix server.
- I've configured postfix to drop the e-mail in a local mail-folder with maildrop.
- maildrop also has a filtering language to get rid of the spam, and sort the messages in different folders. Maildrop's filter language allows my to reconize all those outlook-express virus e-mails, and silly spam messages with incorrect HTML tags (I couldn't even filter those easily in outlook express)
- I can also configure maildrop to sent a vacation e-mail once to every sender, or run a shell-script for new-mail notifications
Reading my e-mail
- I use a local courrier IMAP server to access my mail-folder. This can be done from every application supporting IMAP, including the Squirll mail I hope to setup one day. (ie. I would have webmail access from my own workstation)
- Currently I'm using KMail, because I like it's appearance. (well.. I don't need other features, because that's already done by maildrop.. hehe)
Sending e-mail
- All e-mail is being sent to the local postfix server. This is very fast.
- Then the postfix server tries to deliver the message directly to the correct mailserver (I don't depend on other slow SMTP servers anymore), but will re-try it for 5 days when necessary.
This was a lot of work, but worth all the trouble, because this is very powerful.. :-)
