On Sun, Oct 06, 2013 at 07:34:36AM +0200, miro.ro...@croatiafidelis.hr wrote:
I'm trying to reply to this thread, but I still haven't set up all
the mail tools, so...
And that was the case for weeks! Do you know, folks, that you are guilty of
criminal offence of compelling old people like me to read your manuals, wikis,
howtos and things for longer than the inventors of the internet spent on this
newfangled virtual thingies!
Aargh, I think I finally got the first mail out with normal tools, meaning
dovecot, mutt and ...the following took me so long that I could cry on your
shoulder, kind reader!: ... and with sSMTP after I finally understood that
postfix was an overkill for my needs, and that sSMTP was just fine, and that it
must be within my intellectual reach after all the weeks of dedicated study of
the agglomerate of mailing tools that I was to choose for my future life on the
internet, with a little more chance for true privacy and freedom...
(Just in case: of course I was joking about you people compelling old people to
study.)
I am so confident that things are working, and this will be my first (the test
mail that I just successfully sent is not counted) mail in earnest, that is,
without the help of the odious M$ Outlook or somesuch, which I stopped using at
least five or more years ago, and even without the clever GUI tools like
Thunderbird or Claws-Mail, which are so much better, but they don't compare
with the power that Mutt and his friends Dovecot, Getmail, Maildrop and sSMTP
can arm myself with... So confident that things work now, that I will go
somewhat desparate and unstable if they don't yet again.
http://marc.info/?l=mutt-users&m=138021971816188&w=2
I have made progress on this issue.
For now, have a look at how I solved it, here:
http://www.dovecot.org/list/dovecot/2013-October/092810.html
and there's today's message, which is due anytime there.
But not all is solved, and there are issues.
There are issues, and I intend to expand on them in the subsequent mail.
Let me just, after weeks of my personal research for an actually rather typical
user case like mine (no real but only fantasy FQDN hostname, my case being SOHO
doesn't subtract much to the typicality of my case), let my just emphasize my
findings of what is the best to use for standalone (or part of SOHO) host, in
general terms.
So people who are looking for real mailing life, and don't want to depend on
fine GUI solution that are actually more complicated that the following, only
under the hood, but that's exactly where you need to know things when real
issues affect you in you life on the internet where you need free and
unsurveilled moving and friendship to you wishes and not to some yucky
stasibook, sorry I meant zucky Facebook or the likes...
So for real mailing tools, according to my real-life-needs research that I have
now successfully completed the minimun indispensable for, and which research
lasted pretty long because of my slowliness to pick up new ideas which is
typical of old age (I am actually in my early old age, being 56, but in my
heart I feel young for ever), but also because there was not enough of an
explanation and advice to be found on that issue (actually there was lots of
conflicting advice to be found on the web!), or because I wasn't able to find
sufficiently clear and reliable advice and explanation, or for completeness,
was not able to find it sooner than I did... (have a look at how little or
nothing there is at this time, again: at *this* time, at the time of my writing
this, on namespace that is needed to apply in the Dovecot, to have proper
Maildir++ for your mail and for your Mutt, how little or nothing about it yet,
on the Mutt wiki!)...
So... the real mailing tools for standalone[,SOHO] hosts:
1) getmail to retrieve mail (*)
2) maildrop to sort it (**)
3) Dovecot to serve it (***)
4) sSMTP to send mail (****)
5) Mutt of course (*****)
(*) fetchmail is old and doesn't compare in simplicity and effectiveness
(**) so much simpler than procmail! very powerful!
(***) very popular, not too difficult to configure for a case like mine
(****) while I spent weeks on postfix, and I do have some understanding now of
it: it is a great program!, I wasn't able to configure it for just smtp (no
smtpd, I don't need that at this time), because some things are really hidden
in very ample documentation and not easy to phathom... so much so that I went
on a rampage of learning stunnel and particular configuration of
/etc/default/saslauthd-root_postfix that needed to talk to
/var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd/mux socket or what not... and still didn't
get things to work... And on the other hand I got this sSMTP program to work in
a matter of hours...
(*****) Mutt is my last task, logically last: it works on top of, or needs, all
the previous for all that it does. The (1) to (4) are its preconditions. Mutt
is the last, and Mutt is my next, and with delight. However, notice that
currently I don't even know how to send this mail GnuPG signed, in the native
Mutt way, but I decided to do what I know how to do: cut the text out and
clearsign it separately and insert it back in my editor GnuPG-signed...
Of course if you are just reading this, it means the mail I can now not only
receive with the above listed tools, but also that this mail was sent from Mutt
with sSMTP. (See the paragraph after next on what I am ready to do in the
contrary.)
Surely I will only know that with absolute certainty once I download new mail
with Getmail. But I won't do that first thing. No. First thing is I will backup
the entire Debian system, amd64 jigdo-file downloaded and installed while
offline testing branch, containing this successful mailing tools setup listed
above.
(But I'll put a note at the start of all this text that I am again sending this
from the web, in case I don't get this mail of mine from the Mutt-users list
with getmail, or don't see it on mutt mailing list archives, in the while... I
will not be rewriting any of the text.)
Next, along with the issues with Dovecot namespace and other issues which I
would like to address, I would like to post the configuration files of the
programs, listed above, of this setup, for the convenience of other users in
similar circumstances as mine, who are able to understand how important these
tools are for their good life on the wires.
But, let me remind the readers, as I already have done both on this mailing
list and on the Dovecot list, I take time to do things, I'm not young and
fresh, and go rather slowly with accomplishing all this.
Miroslav Rovis,
Zagreb, Croatia
