How do I properly setup email to work with OX:CE?

[Joey Link]

I just installed OX:CE on a Debian box and I love it. My only problem is I'm not sure the correct way to setup fetchmail to interact with it. Our webhost still handles our domain, web, and email hosting, which is the way I prefer it (I think) but I'd like to set it up so the mail is automatically pulled from the mailboxes on the host server into OX (which I believe is how it's supposed to work with fetchmail). I looked and looked, but can't seem to find a howto for setting up fetchmail with OX without using the admin GUI (since it's not included with CE). Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[Gertjan]

How many users do you have?
Because Fetchmail needs the credentials of all your users on the webhost server.

What you can do is write a credentials file for every user or one file with the info of all users. In my case, I use a file for all users. You can use Fetchmail as a daemon, but I always run it from the /etc/crontab file.
The credentials file /home/<user>/.fetchmailrc looks like this:

poll xs.utwente.nl
     proto IMAP
     user "<remote username>"
     password "<remote password>"
     ssl is "<local user>" here
     sslcertpath "/etc/ssl/certs"

In this example I use ssl to make a connection to the remote server, maybe that's not necessary in your case. Then you can remove the word ssl and the last sslcert line.

In the crontab file I added:

1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * *  <localuser> /usr/bin/fetchmail -s -f /home/<localuser>/.fetchmailrc >/dev/null 2>&1

[Joey Link]

Thank you, I'll try this soon. We have around 15 users.

[Joey Link]

Ok, I got it setup for one user but only by SU'ing as that user then running fetchmail -v. How would I go about doing this with each user that needs this setup? If I create a .fetchmailrc file for each of the users as root and place it in their home directories, won't the permissions be incorrect? Obviously I'm unable to SU to the users which OX creates.

It would probably be easiest for me to just create one userfile. How do I do that?

[Joey Link]

I also have a problem where I can't seem to get the mail for that one user to go into their OX mailbox. If someone could help me, I'd be most grateful.

[Gertjan]

Can't you just put more than one poll string in the .fetchmailrc file? And place that file in /root. Then you don't have the permissions issue. And use one user to run fetchmail.

(Since a few weeks the admin-gui fetchmail part is working in OX:CE. Maybe you can try that?)

[Joey Link]

That's what I tried to do. I ran fetchmail in verbose mode so I could see what was going on, and it downloaded the mail fine, but I couldn't see it in OX. Here's what my .fetchmailrc looks like:

poll mail.barkdusters.com proto pop3 user "joey.link@barkd*sters.com" password "secretpass" is "joey.link" here

poll mail.barkdusters.com proto pop3 user "jason.lawrence@barkd*sters.com" password "secretpass" is "jason.lawrence" here

I know I have the users right, because I can see OX created their directories in /home. I tried using the fetchmail config in the GUI but I keep getting 404 error file not found and 405 error the server doesn't support the PUT command.

[Gertjan]

That's strange. Is the mail still in your mailq? The mail has to be somewhere. Can you sniff around in /var/spool/imap?

[Joey Link]

That's what I was wondering. I mean, if it's downloaded, it's got to be somewhere. I looked in /var/spool/mail and it's not there. Not sure what mailq is (I'm just learning linux) but I typed the command and it had one outgoing message saying comcast blocked a delivery from the server (something else I need to fix, maybe with a trusted relayhost?)

[Gertjan]

What are your maillog files telling?