Web based email on your home network
Here at the Labs we have a little bit of a “control” issue. I like having things running on the machines here rather than on my ISP. Given that, for quite some time now I have used fetchmail to pull down email for the family down to the local network. One of the reasons for this is that I like having network settings that do not have to change if I change ISP’s (though I have no reason to move from DreamHost, they’re great). Another reason is that I’m just a control freak and I don’t like the idea of not being able to have this kind of stuff running on my own.
A few years ago I was looking around on FreshMeat for a web based email package that I could use to check my home email remotely. Not finding one at that time, I had set up procmail to move my email upon receipt to a local mail directory and categorize it into separate folders (for example, the SVN and CruiseControl lists) so that I could read it remotely using Pine (yes, Pine) over an SSH connection.
As I was looking around my ISP’s control panel the other day seeing if they had added services that I did not know about, I found that they had added web based email using the Squirrel Mail package.
Seeing that there was a capability available that I did not yet have on my local network, I decided I really needed to get this working. It wasn’t difficult at all to set up the actual Squirrel Mail package itself once I got PHP installed, however the package requires an IMAP server, something I did not have running on my SuSE 9.0 mail server.
I found the article How To Set Up IMAP On The Cheap on Sunday morning and decided to give installation a shot.
I still have not been able to get the IMAP server working with procmail (there are some strange errors that I have to sit down and debug) however I did wind up getting the SuSE installation of the Cyrus IMAP Server running with my Postfix mail server and actually have web based email software running here at the Labs.
Next step, getting procmail to work with the IMAP server software to automagically move all of this stuff to folders. Once I figure out the issues I’ll post them up here.
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