Arch Linux

urza9814

Member

Registered: 2010-06-05

Posts: 28

Remote POP to local store and IMAP

Hello all!

Recently I've been looking to reduce my dependency on online services -- mostly Google and Facebook. I've just gotten a new laptop, which means my old one is open to set up as a home server. I have several planned uses for it, but I'm running into some issues with figuring out how I want my email set up. I have a concept in mind if I can find the right software, but I'm open to other suggestions as well.

I already own my own domain and a small PaaS hosting package through Gandi.net. Ideally I'd like to just point the MX records to my home connection and be done with it. But being a residential connection the ports are blocked, I can't set up the reverse DNS, the IP is probably part of a dynamic pool that will be assumed spam...and I'm not upgrading to business class internet, so that doesn't seem too feasible. My next thought was to purchase VPS hosting. But in that case all my data is still in control of some third party. A slightly more trustworthy third party, but it's still in some remote data center with no physical access and no idea how it's being managed so that doesn't feel like much of a gain.

So at this point I'm thinking I want a sort of intermediary mail server. I have mail service already included with my domain, so I'll use that as a proxy to filter out the obvious spam and get through the ISP issues. From there I'll have a server on my own lan which retrieves the mail via POP, deleting the original once it's been retrieved (in addition to the practical benefits of to only having them stored there until read, there are some legal benefits too IIRC). And then I'll use IMAP from that server to each of my systems so everything stays in sync.

Anyone with some experience here want to provide some insight on the best way to actually accomplish that? Or a better alternative? It sounds like Courier can do what I want, but I can't seem to find any instructions detailing such a configuration, and Courier seems like way more than I need anyway. Maybe I could use Fetchmail to retrieve and some lightweight MTA to store and access via IMAP? Courier again? Cyrus IMAP? I don't have a clue what I'm looking for here...

rune0077

Member

Registered: 2009-04-11

Posts: 135

Re: Remote POP to local store and IMAP

Consider dovecot. It's faster and more lightweight than courier. Fetchmail (or getmail) would be the way to retrieve from the POP server.