kmail has no wings, doesnt fly.

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Montag, 6. Dezember 2021 19:37:51 CET Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Mon, 6 Dec, 2021 at 1:11 PM, Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:
> Now that's a pretty complex setup. I suggest to add a local dovecot to the
> mix pointing it at the /var/mail/me and pointing KMail via an IMAP
> account at the local dovecot.
> 
> gene>How do I do that?
>
> gene>I would like to do that, long enough to figure out how it works, but
> again I have been unable to make a connection using config>kmail>receive
> account. Just clicking apply freezes it up in that condition until the os
> process killer kills kmail.

Sorry, no idea.

> gene>If there is a problem why does it not report it? Or is it creating a
> log I can't read?

You can try akonadiconsole. It has lots of logging, but for me it this logging 
hasn't been very helpful in the past.

> gene>I have dovecot installed but there seems not to be man pages for
> either. 
 > Trying to run it, gets nothing in a root htop display. If there docs
> addressing this, where they?

Don't know. Try its website. Or the search engine of your choice. Or look into 
/usr/share/doc/packages/dovecot/ (or whereever your distribution puts 
dovecot's documentation).

Anyway, that's what I did for setting up dovecot:

0.) Create a local user account, e.g. USER, and set up fetchmail to fetch the 
mail for this local user, so that the fetched mail ends up in /var/mail/USER.

1.) Enable authentication via passwd (which is totally sufficient on my single 
user machine). In /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-auth.conf
a) Comment out the line, i.e. put a '#' in front
!include auth-system.conf.ext
b) Comment in the line, i.e. remove '#' in front
!include auth-passwdfile.conf.ext

2.) Set location for users' mailboxes. In
/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf
change the line
#mail_location =
to
mail_location = mbox:~/mail:INBOX=/var/mail/%u

3.) Disable TLS support (makes no sense for a local setup). In
/etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf
change the line
#ssl =
to
ssl = no

4.) Create a password file for virtual users. I put something like
USER:{PLAIN}secret:user id of USER:group id of USER::/home/USER
in /etc/dovecot/users, where "secret" is the actual password as plain text. As 
I said this is a single user machine, so I figured using a plain text password 
is okay.

Restart dovecot. Probably with something like
sudo systemctl restart dovecot.service

This will make dovecot fetch mail from /var/mail/USER and it will use /home/
USER/mail for storage. You won't need to touch /home/USER/mail, but you may 
want to include it in your backup.

Then in KMail I created an IMAP account with server "localhost", username 
"USER", password "password". For this account I've disabled "Download all 
messages for offline use" (because obviously all mail is already stored 
locally ready for offline use) and I've disabled encryption.

You may not really need a separate local user account. For me it was just 
easier this way.

Regards,
Ingo
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