Re: [Evolution] Kmail

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Thu, 2010-01-21 at 07:29 +1000, Gerald wrote:
> On Thursday 21 January 2010 04:17:11 am Braden McDaniel wrote:
> > On 1/18/10 1:40 PM, Gerald wrote:
> > > Is there a filter that will allow me to import Kmail mail into Evolution?
> > > I usually have kmail/Evolution on all machines that I have running and at
> > > some point merge all machines to one of them to get all the sentmail etc
> > > updated.
> >
> > That sounds... painful.
> >
> > Have you thought about just running a local IMAP server?
> >
> > Braden
> Hi Braden,
> That, I would not know how to do!!
> People say that moving Kmail into Evolution is possible with something called 
> 'maildir' but a google search does not provide any real info.

Maildir is an on-disk format for reliably storing messages ("reliably"
means that it even works over NFS with multiple clients without needing
the flaky NFS locking protocol). It stores each message as a file and
each folder as a directory, plus some other stuff. Google certainly
provides a huge amount of info about it if you look, but you can start
with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maildir.

> Does one set up IMAP as one would Kmail/Evolution then have it server the 
> collected mail to other machines? Can one send mail form it as well from
>  any machine? Sorry for the questions but I really do not know about IMAP!!

IMAP is the main alternative to POP as a way of getting your mail from a
server, i.e. it's an application protocol oriented towards fetching and
searching email. There are multiple implementations (Cyrus, Dovecot,
Courier, ...) and some large email providers also support it, notably
Gmail. See Wikipedia again for a starting point.

So you can certainly provide access to mail to other machines if you
want, but what Braden is suggesting is more limited: use a program such
as fetchmail to download your mail from one or more accounts and store
it in a local IMAP server. Courier or Dovecot are probably good for this
(Cyrus is probably overkill) and they both support maildir as a storage
format. Then point your clients (Evo, TBird etc.) to your local server
and away you go. Note however that IMAP is not for *sending* mail, just
for receiving it, i.e. you just keep using your SMTP service as before.

However if all this reads like hieroglyphics, perhaps better not.

poc