[wellylug] Postfix -> Maildrop -> CourierIMAP integration

[David Antliff]

My email (on Debian Sid) has been working fine for years. I run fetchmail 
to grab my email from my ISP and it ends up in my local mailbox. I just 
happened to be using exim and I never had a need to change it, although I 
did install CourierIMAP a year or two ago to allow me to access my 
mailboxes from any machine on my LAN. Mailboxes are 'Maildir' format now.

These days I have a fair few scripts running around the place that email 
their results to me. It's getting to the point where I'd like to start 
filtering these into their own mailboxes. Naturally I *could* do this with 
one of my email clients, but that would mean lack of centralisation of 
that logic and wouldn't work in my case. It would make more sense, I 
think, to perform the filtering as the emails are delivered to my mail 
directory.

I looked up procmail but an alternative called 'maildrop' sounded 
interesting, and supposedly solves many problems with procmail. 'maildrop' 
should not be confused with part of Postfix also called 'maildrop' (can 
you see where this is leading?)

Also, I found enough evidence to suggest I upgrade from exim to postfix.

So I upgraded from exim to postfix (apt-get install postfix). Easy. Email 
still works.

Now, I want to integrate maildrop. Almost everything I can find online 
says to add this to /etc/postfix/main.cf:

mailbox_transport = maildrop

I've checked (the default) Postfix master.cf file and it specifies this 
'transport' correctly. Well, seems to:

maildrop  unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
   flags=DRhu user=vmail argv=/usr/bin/maildrop -d ${recipient}


To cut a long story short, I seem to be completely unable to get the 
'local' component of Postfix to invoke 'maildrop'. I have watched the logs 
(mail.log, mail.info) and turned on qmgr and local verbosity and no matter 
what I do with that main.cf file, the emails are still delivered directly 
to the maildir (by postfix/local).

Oh, yes, I *am* restarting postfix after changing any config files.

I have also read way too much of the Postfix documentation and 
unfortunately it wasn't much help. As far as I can see, I am doing the 
"right thing" but it's simply not working and I have no idea where to 
start looking.

Does anyone know what I might be missing here? I largely have the default 
config files installed (although I note that there are two maildrop 
packages in Debian Sid, one is called 'courier-maildrop' and it doesn't 
come with any config file. However, since I can't get postfix to invoke 
maildrop it really doesn't matter at this point).

Supplementary question: does anyone know what I have to have 
'/home/david/Maildir' in my ~/.forward for email delivery to work at all? 
Is this the 'key' that makes CourierIMAP work? It's been a while since I 
did this and I never made a note why...


Thanks,

-- 
David.