How to setup dovecot and postfix

Heya @wolfgangbuesser,

It seems like you’re on the right track. I’ll try to address your questions and provide you with a simple guide to achieve your desired setup.

1. You mentioned that you already have Dovecot running and can access your locally stored email via IMAP. That’s great! Let’s move on to the next step.

2. To make Postfix send mail locally to Dovecot, you need to configure Postfix to use Dovecot’s LMTP (Local Mail Transfer Protocol) service. LMTP is more efficient than LDA (Local Delivery Agent) and is the recommended method for Dovecot. Here’s a simple configuration to achieve this:

• Configure Postfix to use Dovecot’s LMTP service. Edit the /etc/postfix/main.cf file and add the following lines:

mailbox_transport = lmtp:unix:private/dovecot-lmtp

• Edit the Dovecot configuration file, usually located at /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf or /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf, and set the mail location:

mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir

• Enable and configure the LMTP service in Dovecot. Edit the file /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-lmtp.conf:

service lmtp {
  unix_listener /var/spool/postfix/private/dovecot-lmtp {
    mode = 0600
    user = postfix
    group = postfix
  }

  protocol lmtp {
    postmaster_address = postmaster@yourdomain.com
    hostname = yourdomain.com
  }
}

3. For fetchmail to pick up mail from your internet provider via POP3 and use Postfix to distribute it locally, you’ll need to configure fetchmail. Create a configuration file, for example, ~/.fetchmailrc:

poll your.provider.com protocol POP3
    user "your_username@provider.com" password "your_password"
    is "local_username" here
    fetchall
    no ssl

Replace the placeholders with the appropriate values for your provider and local username. Then, run fetchmail in the background:

fetchmail -d 300

This will make fetchmail run as a daemon, checking for new mail every 5 minutes (300 seconds).

With these configurations, you should be able to achieve the setup you described. Let me know if you have any questions or need further assistance.