Like many of us, I have been enjoying reasonably spam free, sorted, and web-accessible mail via exim/fetchmail/procmail/spamassasin/imap/squirrelmail. It has been a delight. Not content with good enough, I have been toying with the idea of using courier-imap instead of uw-imap. Courier uses the maildir format apparently developed by DJB for qmail, and Uw-imap uses the standard mbox format. The way I understand it, maildir can be much less processor intensive for large or multiple mailboxes.
On a test box I have begun the process. Great documentation has been found via our friend Google. http://talk.trekweb.com/~jasonb/articles/exim_maildir_imap.shtml But I am having trouble. My mail is being picked up by fetchmail and exim is delivering it to /var/mail/username. The thing is, there is no mail in my inbox when using an imap client. Courier wants the message to be in the $home/Maildir/cur folder. When I send mail from the localhost to a user on the machine, the mail ends up in that user's Maildir as it should. When I have fetchmail retrieve mail for that user, the spam is processed by procmail to its respective Maildir box, but the mail goes to /var/mail/username instead of into the Maildir. I am pointing my finger at exim or procmail. My exim.conf file has the following added to it: directory=${home}/Maildir maildir_format = true prefix = "" under the local_delivery section. When that did not work, I thought the problem was with my procmail recipe. I added to the top of procmail MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir DEFAULT=$MAILDIR LOGFILE=$HOME/procmail.log VERBOSE=off SPAM=$HOME/Maildir/.Spam/ with the idea that once exim passed the mail to procmail, procmail needed to know that I was using the maildir format. Still no success. I had been using .forward to call procmail, and I have tried adding the mda line to fetchmail to call procmail. My mail still goes to /var/mail. After setting up another account without procmail, fetchmail gets the mail and exim puts it into the Maildir. When using an imap client, I see the mail in my Inbox. It seems that there is some trouble with how Procmail is handling the messages. I guess that I could take procmail out of the picture and call spamassassin through exim, but then I lose the sorting capabilities of procmail. Has anyone made a conversion like this, and if so, did you have any trouble? It seems from the lack of hits on Google that I must have done something wrong, but I just cannot track it down. If you made it this far and have a suggestion, I would appreciate it. If my verbose message is missing some detail, please let me know and I will elaborate. --scott
