Quite some time ago I wrote a tutorial on how to integrate fetchmail and sieve into virtual mail with Postfix and Dovecot. As time passes and things change, here’s an update:
- I don’t use the sieve part anymore. Instead, I use the ManageSieve server provided by Dovecot. It integrates with Dovecot’s authentication system and you can use all kinds of clients supporting the managesieve protocol, e.g. Thunderbird or Roundcube.
- The ISPMail database structure changed since I wrote that tutorial which still relied on the DB structure for the Debian Etch structure. I updated the script to reflect both environments (take a look at the config file). However, it does not rely on any DB views anymore.
- The script (only the Fetchmail part) is now hosted on GitHub as I rarely use SVN anymore and the SVN may go offline in the near future. If anybody is interested in the Sieve part, just drop me a line.
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.
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