[H-GEN] Email migration

Stephen Thorne stephen.thorne at gmail.com
Tue Mar 29 18:24:35 EST 2005


On Wed, 30 Mar 2005 08:15:25 +1000, Sarah Walters <sarah at walters.id.au> wrote:
> Michael Anthon wrote:
> > I use real accounts on the system and use maildir folders for each
> > user (the IMAP server simply gives access to ~/Maildir for each
> > user).  Delivery via procmail is a snap with this setup and works very
> > well.  The extra benefit here is that you can also access the maildir
> > folders using mutt.  Not quite sure how that would work with virtual
> > user accounts though as I've never investigated that.
> 
> Mutt can access an IMAP server just fine. Personally, I don't think that
> all users should have an account on your server - it's just one more
> thing that you have to lock down.

"Just Fine" is dependant on getting your mutt configured properly.
IMAP works, but it doesn't cache the headers by default. This means
that if you have 6000 emails in your IMAP box, it will download all
the headers, every time you open the box in mutt. This isn't optimal.

The debian[1] version applies a patch[2], doing a quick poke shows
that the patch is also available here:

http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/~sithglan/mutt/mutt-cvs-header-cache.24

the correct configuration option required in ~/.muttrc is this:

set header_cache="~/.mutt-headercache"

This will cache the headers in a local file. The file takes non-zero
time to read, but at least the bottleneck is CPU, not Network.

To configure mutt to open an imap folder by default, without asking
for username and password, this configuration works:

set imap_user = "username"
set imap_pass = "password"
set spoolfile = "imap://hostname/"

-- 
Stephen Thorne
Development Engineer

[1] and therefore ubuntu
[2] mutt-1.5.6/upstream/extra-patches/header-cache




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