Steve at fivetrees <steve@NOSPAMTAfivetrees.com> wrote:

> "Steve at fivetrees" <steve@NOSPAMTAfivetrees.com> wrote in message
> news:iP2dnYkExOrgeTXbnZ2dnUVZ8rOdnZ2d@pipex.net...

> >
> > Afterthought: it would be *great* if I could deliver incoming mail to
> > Maildir (Dovecot) inboxes too...
>
> To answer my own post (for the archives), the getmail package is looking
> very promising. It's intended as a replacement for fetchmail, and
> delivers to maildirs very nicely. And deals with multidrop mailboxes
> explicitly.
>
> I was puzzled for a while by getmail delivering directly to maildirs -
> that's all very well for mail downloaded from an external mailbox, but
> what about mail sent to/from local users by sendmail? It finally dawned
> on me that I could use getmail to fix that too - by "downloading" from
> the local server using pop3 and thus delivering to the maildir.
>
> (Unless of course there's a "better" way, and I'm missing something,
> which is not just possible but likely...)
>

You start with the wrong assumption that sendmail does local delivery of
email. sendmail doesn't. In OpenBSD, /usr/libexec/mail.local does. And
you are right, mail.local does not deliver to Maildir, only mbox.

After installing Dovecot, you should have modified sendmail to use a
local delivery agent that works better with Dovecot (Dovecot's own LDA
"deliver" for exemple.)

I don't use fetchmail in a multidrop setup, but I do by pass sendmail by
delivering via procmail directly. I use the mda option for that.

I don't know how getmail gets to bypass sendmail. It might work because
all the Maildir directories are owned by the same user you run getmail
as.