[geeks] Building a local IMAP server on OpenIndiana

Bill Green bill at supposedly.org
Wed Nov 20 20:07:05 CST 2013


On 11/20/2013 12:02 PM, Mark Benson wrote:
> I don't want to download, process or send mail, just store it in an IMAP
> structure so that any mail client can access it and use it to store messages
> 'offline' via a garden-variety mail client. I also don't (at least immediately)
> require access from outside my LAN. Being up to date/secure/customisable isn't
> al arge concern either.

I'm a little confused by your wording, as I think you'll have to "download" the
mail from the remote server (that Mail.app doesn't like) in any case, but
assuming that I'm not misunderstanding your intention, there are at least two
solutions to pull IMAP mail to a local machine and keep the two mailboxes in sync:

1) Offlineimap <http://offlineimap.org/>
2) Dovecot's "dsync" utility <http://wiki2.dovecot.org/Tools/Dsync>

You can run either as a cron job to keep the two mailboxes synchronized.
Offlineimap can run as a daemon, as well.  Once you have the mail locally you
can run whatever IMAP server you want to serve it (dovecot is easy to
configure), or just use whatever MUA to access it directly.


More information about the geeks mailing list