[ale] Personal e-mail setup for remote access

[Ben Coleman]

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Greg Freemyer wrote:
| I need to restructure my linux desktop e-mail setup so I can easily
| access/manage the e-mail from home as well as from the office.

I'm doing something similar right now with my own email.  All of my mail
comes to a mail server at home, but I needed to be able to access it
from client sites or at our work home office.

<snip>


| I'm thinking of setting up the below, comments are appreciated:
|
| 1) Use fetchmail to retrieve my pop3 e-mail and drop it into my linux
| desktops sendmail.

I do this with some of my mindspring mailboxes.  Generally works pretty
well, except that I used to occasionally find that fetchmail would no
longer be running and I'd have to restart it.  Since I have both
mindspring and my own domain that feed into the same mailbox, it would
occasionally be a few days before I would discover that fetchmail had
quit.  It has, though, been quite a while since this happened (I don't
think it has happened since I upgraded the mail machine to Slackware
9.1, so it's likely that a recent fetchmail has fixed this problem.  I
would, therefore, advise using a recent fetchmail).


| 2) Setup a imap server on my desktop.

I've done this on my mail server.  I'm using the imap server that comes
with Slackware.

| 3) Re-conifigure evolution to manage the imap mailbox instead of
| maintaining its own.

I don't use Evolution, so I can't comment much here.


| 4) Also access/manage the imap mailbox from my house via a imap client.
| (The machine I want to use is XP, so I have to decide what client I want
| to use, but it will likely be something from cygwin.)

If you're not accessing your work network via a VPN, I'd advise setting
up your imap access through an SSL tunnel, to avoid broadcasting your
password in the clear.  It is pretty easy to do using either stunnel or
ssh, but you may need to have the firewall admin to set up an incoming
port to redirect to the ssh port or to whatever port you have stunnel
set up to listen to (usually 993 for imap).

As far as Winders imap clients go, I've been pretty pleased with
Thunderbird, the mail client derived from the Mozilla mail client.  As a
matter of fact, I carry around a copy on a USB memory thumb.  If I have
a need to access my email from a client site, I can plug it into just
about any modern Winders machine, do a little configuration and have
access to my email at home.  It handles imap over SSL nicely.

Ben


- --
Ben Coleman oloryn at benshome.net      | The attempt to legislatively
http://oloryn.home.mindspring.com/   | micromanage equality results, at
Amateur Radio NJ8J                   | best, in equal misery for all.
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