Andy Balaam’s Blog

Setting up Mozilla Thunderbird

On the same machine that was running Dovecot, I set up Thunderbird to be able to access my email. I did this by creating a new email account (which I called “Andy IMAP”), choosing “localhost” as the server, and entering the username I created in /etc/imap.passwd (‘brian’ in the example I gave) as the username. I set up all the other settings as I wanted them, and clicked OK.

When I clicked “Get New Messages,” Thunderbird asked for my password, and I entered the password I had put into /etc/imap.passwd (’sausages’ in the example I gave). Now I could see some folders had appeared under the new account I had created, but there was nothing in them.

I tested whether I could read and write emails to the account by dragging an email from another folder (in an old account) to the “Inbox” folder in the new account “Andy IMAP”. It copied OK, and when I clicked on Inbox I could see the email in the list, and when I clicked the email its contents appeared in the preview pane. Success! My IMAP account existed.

Next time, how I made emails that people sent to me appear in my new Inbox.

Recently I have managed to get pretty much my ideal email system set up. This is the kind of thing that would simply be impossible on a Windows box, but (when you know how) is a quick job on Linux. I didn’t know how, but now I do (ish). I’m going to do it in separate installments, trying to make them slightly self-contained.

Setting up an IMAP server

I chose Dovecot because it looked fairly good, and it came high up on Google. Installing it on Fedora Core 3 was just:

yum install dovecot

But then I needed to set up the config file. The only thing I changed looked like this:

default_mail_env = maildir:~/Maildir

I did this because after reading the scare stories about locking when using an mbox-type mailbox, I decided Maildir sounded safer. Maildir holds each mail in a separate file, which sounds good for preventing corruption if something goes wrong, so I chose it. It seems to work ok.

I left the passwords to be plain text for the moment, which meant my /etc/imap.passwd had to look like this:

brian:{PLAIN}sausages:500:500::/home/brian

Where ‘brian’ would be your username and ’sausages’ the password you have decided to use for mail. If you’re using plain text passwords, don’t use the same password as your login password, because any old packet sniffer will be able to see the mail password.

With this set up, I had a working IMAP server which stored messages in my home dir under the ~/Maildir directory. Of course, there were no messages in there at the moment – that’s coming up later. Next time, how I made Mozilla Thunderbird see the messages stored there!

Now that my Christian youth holiday is over, I’ve got just one more major job to do before I can get back to working on FreeGuide: my thesis corrections. I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but it will certainly be painful. It might be best to avoid me for a few weeks if you don’t like “grumpy Andy”.