Subject: Re: fetchmail/mutt/procmail howto?
From: Jason Tishler <[email-masked]>
To: Shane Owenby <[email-masked]>
Cc: Cygwin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Nov 2002 22:10:13 -0500

Shane,

On Thu, Nov 07, 2002 at 05:12:47PM -0800, Shane Owenby wrote:
> I have been reading the archives from the cygwin site, and I came
> across this posting of yours:
> 
> Re: Windows XP, inetd, and procmail, fetchmail, and mutt
> http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-01/msg01165.html
> 
> Yes, my question is coming ;-)
> 
> Do you know of a combined HOWTO or step by step instructions on getting
> what seems like me to be a very common request (fetchmail + procmail +
> mutt + postfix*cough* I mean ssmtp) running with cygwin?

Unfortunately, no.  The closest that I know of is the somewhat stale
SourceForge Unixmail for Windows project:

    http://unixmail-w32.sourceforge.net/

However, I have written individual READMEs for fetchmail:

    http://www.tishler.net/jason/software/fetchmail/fetchmail-6.1.0.README
    /usr/doc/Cygwin/fetchmail-6.1.0.README

and procmail:

    http://www.tishler.net/jason/software/procmail/procmail-3.22.README
    /usr/doc/Cygwin/procmail-3.22.README

And the mutt, exim, and ssmtp contributors have written their own
individual READMEs.

Note that postfix will not have any chance of running until someone
finally and properly submits the mkfifo patch that has been floating
around for a while.

> I have been in contact with the guy that you responded to in that
> email (Pat from cisco) and he hasn't been able to get the entire set
> working....but I have no idea how much time he has put into it.  I
> love my current email setup on Linux, and I am hoping to be able to
> replicate that via cygwin.

You should be able to easily accomplish the above with the exception of
postfix which you could replace with exim.

For example, my Cygwin email processing setup is as follows:

    fetchmail
    procmail
    spamassassin
    mutt
    gnupg
    exim
    ssmtp (mutt exim queue submitter)
    aspell (mutt spellchecker)
    w3m (mutt HTML viewer)
    mutt-mailcap-glue (mutt Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. viewers)

Except for installing fetchmail and exim as services, configuring the
rest is the same as on Linux.  Even the mutt-mailcap-glue stuff
available at:

    http://www.tishler.net/jason/software/mutt/mutt-mailcap-glue.tar.bz2

are just shell scripts (which have been mostly obviated by cygstart).

BTW, there are also POP3 and IMAP packages for Cygwin:

    ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/pc/gnuwin32/cygwin/porters/Humblet_Pierre_A/V1.1/qpopper-4.0.3-cygwin-1.3-bin.README
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/uw-imap-cygwin/

I helped someone in the past that uses fetchmail, procmail,
spamassassin, and either the POP3 or IMAP package to serve up email to
his entire family that use MS mail clients.  All without a single Linux
box!  Very cool!

> I will most likely write up my findings in a HOWTO or a web page with
> my experiences/lessons_learned...but before I start that process I
> hoped you might know of a HOWTO.  I am not subscribed to the cygwin
> list so please don't respond there.

I encourage you to do the above -- I'm even willing to help you.  As you
can see from the above, most of the pieces of your HOWTO are already
available -- they just need to be cobbled together.  However, I would
really prefer that your work be contributed to Cygwin and live in
/usr/doc/Cygwin instead of somewhere else.  Maybe the cygwin-doc package
would be a suitable place?

> I will continue to RTFMArchives,

You also may want to check the mutt archives.  There may be some useful
Cygwin specific information in those archives too.

Jason

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