kmail has no wings, doesnt fly.

[Gene Heskett]

On Mon, 6 Dec, 2021 at 3:40 PM, Ingo Klöcker <kloecker at kde.org> wrote:
 

To: kdepim-users at kde.org
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<mailto: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).



debian's gotta be different. I found it in /usr/share/doc/dovecot-core/wiki, and its
about a thousand short files, sorta one for each variable. I suspect grep will 

be helpful.



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.



As a mailfile or as a maildir? If I comment the last recipe in ~/.procmarlrc,
I'll get one huge mailfile there, so I moved it out of the way and created
a /var/mail/gene directory owned by me. And if I uncomment the last recipe,
then it makes individual mail files in msg.##### format in the $HOMEDIR path.
In handling mailfiles, the old kmail kept the mailfile there but empty.



But that means I'll have to define more places than just $HOMEDIR.


That I can do also, but mailfile has been working just fine for almost 20 years
this way.


Doing that will also screw up inotifywait as I'll have to run an instance per
procmail sorted target.  So how would I convince dovecot to use a mailfile?


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
Done those two.
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
was already there.


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

done that


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.


That is a "user" file, sanitize yours and post it plz so I can see exact syntax.



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


But not until I've created a correct "users" file.


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.

/home/me/Mail (not caps) already has about 17GB of old mail mail files 

in its maildirs, recovered from a backup and already imported into the new
kmail's mysql database.


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.



I think I already have.


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

easier this way.

Regards,
Ingo


Thanks a  bunch, Ingo
Cheers, Gene.
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