[CentOS] Email access via Android device

Frank Cox theatre at melvilletheatre.com
Mon Oct 7 22:20:18 UTC 2013


On Mon, 7 Oct 2013 16:52:42 -0500
Les Mikesell wrote:

> Hard to beat a free gmail account - if you are concerned about
> privacy, you probably shouldn't be sending the stuff over the internet
> in the first place.

I figure that if my data lives on my computer, I know where it is and I can
read it, search it, back it up and delete it anytime I want.

I learned a long time ago that if you see something on the Internet that you
think you might want to refer to in the future, get it now because it might not
be there tomorrow.

> But, the tools are available to run your own  imap server so you can see the
> same mailboxes from multiple devices.

Having given this matter considerable thought over the past couple of days (and
given Google a work-out too), here is my current plan, subject to any of
you folks telling me where I'm going wrong.  (I'm thinking that once I have
this all set up and working I'll write a little article about how to do it and
post it on my website.)

I plan to use fetchmail in daemon mode to poll all six mailservers for incoming
mail, postfix to put incoming mail into a Maildir in my home directory, set up
dovecot and point Sylpheed at that to read new and existing mail.

For outbound mail my best idea so far is to set up postfix to send outbound
mail via the appropriate mailserver by checking the From: field.  I see a
method for doing that here: http://tekman.livejournal.com/83609.html

By doing it this way I can get away with doing everything over a ssh tunnel to
my main computer from my Android device.  VX Connectbot apparently supports ssh
tunneling so once that and K9Mail (which I haven't actually installed or
looked at yet) are set up on my phone it should just work.

>   Alternatively your android device is perfectly capable of dealing
> with 6 remote servers directly.

The reason for handling outbound email this way instead of sending it directly
from my phone (or whatever) is that this way I won't have to worry about sender
restrictions on the various mailservers.  For example,  my own little mail and
webserver lives on the 192.168.0.x network in my theatre, and postfix relay is
set up to permit_mynetworks only.  In addition, I think (though I'm not
completely certain) that both of the ISPs that I have service from allow email
to be relayed through their mailservers only from a network address that's one
of theirs.  I have routing tables set up on my main computer to make sure that
outbound email goes out via the appropriate gateway.  I won't have to open up
my own mailserver to relay any more than it does now, and the outbound email
should continue to work as it does now.

It appears that I can make this whole mess work over a ssh connection via VX
Connectbot, so simply forwarding port 22 on my gateway routers to my main
computer should buy me everything that I need.  Plus that gives me a commandline
on my main computer from anywhere, and I can play with vnc on my phone too.  I
don't know how usable vnc would actually be on such a small screen but I'll
give it a shot one of these days and see what it looks like.

That's my scheme so far.  Any of you fine folks are very welcome to tell me why
it won't work or suggest a better way to get from Point A to Point B.  I've
never set up anything quite like this before so it's a figure-it-out-as-I-go
procss.

I'm obviously going to set up some dummy email accounts and experiment with
this a bit and get it all up and running before trying to convert my real email
and go live with it.  I really don't want to blow up my email; things would
become far more interesting that they need to be if something like that
happened.

I think it'll be pretty cool once it's up and running, though.



-- 
MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Real D 3D Digital Cinema ~ www.melvilletheatre.com



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