gary’s web sofa

Dovecot seems nice. It’s simple to setup, it’s secure, and it’ll run on any old POS computer, but server side filtering setup is poorly documented. If I only accessed email from a single computer, or all email I receive is of equal priority then it wouldn’t be a problem. I do not need to see mailing list traffic when I’m on the road, so it should be automatically be transferred out of my inbox into a folder that I can check less frequently.

This is easy as pie to set up in any desktop email client, but I check my email on the move with my Nokia e61, on my laptop when I get a chance to sit down, Outlook, Thunderbird, Outlook Express or Evolution when at one of my work desktops, and webmail everywhere else! Therefore I need the emails to be sorted on the server, before they get downloaded to an email client.

Sieve seems to be the tool of choice, but you have to compile it from source on Debian, which defeats the point. People use Debian because of it’s package management. I log into each of my servers each week and run “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” and I know everything gets brought up to date. Having to manually track a specific application’s release cycle and bugs just makes things messy.

The search continues….

I’m throwing in the towel with Scalix. As a drop in replacement to Exchange it’s perfect for 90% of companies. Unfortunately my mail server is a PIII 1GHz which just isn’t up to running Scalix’s Java web interface. The Outlook connector is good, but not perfect. It tends to lock up Outlook on low bandwidth network links, so it’s useless when I’m checking my email on the road over my 384Kbs ADSL link.

I’m back with Postfix/Courier-IMAP, but I’ve still got the original problem of synchronising calendars and contacts.

I’m still sorting out the wrinkles (I might have to read the manual!!!) but it’s looking very neat. The web interface is almost a fully featured as Outlook. The one issue I’m having right now is with multiple inboxes. I want to have a seperate inbox for work and personal emails, and the Outlook connector has a configuration option to have multiple mailboxes connected at the same time, but opening the 2nd mailbox throws a “This set of folders cannot be opened” error….

I get a lot of email, and I have very little time to read it. I also access email from one of several computers, PDAs, phones, web caf????’s, hotels etc. I decided a while ago to setup an email server on my home LAN to consolidate everything. I could also have server based filtering, so when I was on platforms where I pay per MB (GPRS), I would only have important stuff in my Inbox, and all the other stuff would be sorted into folders where I could read it when I got onto a LAN.

I setup courier-IMAP-ssl, postfix, procmail, and clamAV on my Debian Sarge server, used fetchmail to pull emails from Gmail, work and a few other places, and things were good. I had the same consolidated set of virus-free mail folders everywhere, it was IMAP so I had the choice of almost every email client on every platform when it came to reading email. For web caf????s and hotels, I installed RoundCube|Mail as a web front end (very pretty interface and it gets the job done).

That was fine for a while, but I’ve begun to rely more and more on the tasks, calendar, contacts, notes functionality of Outlook on my laptop to manage work stuff, and at this stage it’s key to my daily work. It’s always backed up, but I need a way of accessing it in the same way I access my email. I need the same up to date copy of the data wherever I go, with whatever device I’m using. At one stage I was even thinking of using Exchange! Buying in a server, Windows 2003 and a copy of Exchange was overkill, so I parked it for a while. I played with some Apache/webDAV based stuff that in theory allowed multiple Outlook instances to share data, but it still didn’t fix the problems of accessing the same data on PDAs, other OSs and no OS (web browser only). There are other web based groupware products (like eGroupWare, PHProjekt, Open-Xchange, Zimbra, SugarCRM etc.) but they either don’t connect to Outlook, connect poorly/incompletely, or have a payware connector (I’m cheap!).

A couple of weeks ago I saw a mention of Scalix on a mailing list I subscribe to. It’s a commercial product, but there’s a free, virtually feature-complete version available for sites of <= 25 users. It includes an Outlook connector that provides an almost perfect replication of Exchange’s functionality. It runs on Red Hat and SUSE, so there was a ???????0 cost to me! I don’t fancy running it on Fedora, don’t like SUSE, and don’t want to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Server (they make enough out of me in the office!) so I went for CentOS, which is a free unbranded version of RHES. Scalix needed a bit of persuasion to install. It actually refuses to install on any other distros, even if all the dependancies are there, so I edited the /etc/redhat-release to fool Scalix into thinking I was installing on RHES 4.