Using IMAP only application with POP3 service.

benjkaiser · 2013-09-13 19:50:22

I am looking for an email client to take me away from Thunderbird since it is somewhat discontinued and doesn't work extremely well with my window manager (has bugs attaching files that cause UI to become unresponsive). And I found a nice email client called Geary, however it only supports IMAP email services (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) and my work email only supports POP3 (out of my control). Is there a way I can pull down mail over pop3 and have a mail server running on the local computer pushing it through imap? and then the reverse for sending mail (through the mail server then out through pop3).

I tried doing a bit of poking around with postfix and fetchmail however I couldn't get them to link up. Fetchmail could successfully pull the email, but could not then forward to ben.k@localhost (which I did have an alias setup for in postfix to redirect to benkaiser, my username). And then from geary I was unable to connect to the local smtp server. How do I configure the username and password for postfix email? and is it accessible on the default smtp ports?

Any ideas on how to configure this would be much appreciated.

WonderWoofy · 2013-09-13 19:58:00

That idea doesn't really jive with the pop3 concept. Pop3 is uni-directional, and is only pulled to your local machine. There is no sync in the other direction. This is why imap tends to be the preferred standard by most people, as what happens on one device can be pushed back and those changes are reflected on any other connected device.

Your idea here seems a bit much. You have found a nice email client, but you now want to shoehorn compatibility for something with which it wasn't designed for?

I think a more sane solution would be to simply find something that syncs from the work's pop3 server and downloads mail locally, either in an mbox or a maildir. Then simply use that as the spool for that particular account. It just seems like having the intermediary server really gains no practical advantage unless you have a shit ton of mail and a lack of space on your day-to-day machine.

benjkaiser · 2013-09-13 20:09:18

Oh that makes sense. So just getting my head around things, SMTP is used by clients for both POP3 and IMAP? In which case the email client should be able to send email to work's mail server.

Any suggestions of a way to download the pop3 mail and then view it in the IMAP-only email client? other than setting up a local server? (or are you suggesting putting the mail directly in the data-directories for the mail client?)

progandy · 2013-09-13 20:24:38

He suggests you use a mailclient that supports pop3 or use a modular approach. On unix there is a maildir standard for storing mails in a directory structure. Then you use a pop client that reads mail and writes it into the maildir (e.g. getmail) . Now you have another application that displays the contents of the maildir (e.g. balsa, mutt, ...) and uses something like sendmail to send mails via SMTP.

benjkaiser · 2013-09-13 21:19:27

Thanks for suggesting Balsa. It looks pretty good, supports POP3 and IMAP, and works with attachments in my window manager. The only downside seems to be the plain-text email editor. Apart from that its great.

Arch Linux

#1 2013-09-13 19:50:22

Using IMAP only application with POP3 service.

#2 2013-09-13 19:58:00

Re: Using IMAP only application with POP3 service.

#3 2013-09-13 20:09:18

Re: Using IMAP only application with POP3 service.

#4 2013-09-13 20:24:38

Re: Using IMAP only application with POP3 service.

#5 2013-09-13 21:19:27

Re: Using IMAP only application with POP3 service.

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