Fetchmail and Sieve with Virtual Mail on Debian Etch
Posted on in Development, How-Tos, Linux, Server
Update: This post is quite old and does not work out of the box with the current ISPMail tutorials. I posted an update here.
When it comes to mail servers, I really like the setup Christoph Haas describes in his Document Howto: ISP-style Email Server with Debian-Etch and Postfix 2.3. One thing I was missing on a server was the ability to automatically generate config files for fetchmail and sieve from the database in order to get mail from other servers and being able to apply server side filters on incoming mail. This howto is based on the mentioned tutorial.
The additional setup is quite simple: 2 more database tables hold the data for fetchmail and sieve rules and a set of PHP scripts called by cron every few minutes fetches the data and writes it into the appropriate config files. For fetchmail, a script creates a .fetchmailrc file in /home/vmail/. For sieve, another script creates a .dovecot.sieve config file for every user who got sieve rules in the database.