Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
On Mon, 13 May 2013, Jason White <jason@jasonjgw.net> wrote:
You could of course have it forwarded to an address @gmail.com or any other email address for much the same result. While running your own mail server is nice it's not required for such things.
Exactly, but using your own domain has the advantage that you can change the server arrangements and simply update the MX records. I have no doubt that various service providers will gladly host mail for a customer's domain, but I haven't explored these options yet as I can run my own server. Google offer this but I don't know at what price, to mention one prominent example.
Fetchmail has a much lower reliability requirement than most "server" software. So you can run Fetchmail on a workstation or laptop. Fetchmail only really needs to be working when you are likely to read mail...
The interesting competitor here is offlineimap: it synchronizes mail between maildir folders and an IMAp server. The right way to do this, from my perspective, is to create a daemon that uses inotify, but when I last looked a few years ago, offlineimap couldn't be configured to work this way. There are well informed people who prefer it, however.
Finally, configure the MUA to use a different outbound address depending on which folder is current (I think some will let you do this based on headers of the message to which you're replying, but folder-based address selection is still convenient for writing new messages that aren't replying to incoming mail). This arrangement generalizes in the obvious way to any number of distinct identities with distinct e-mail addresses.
Kmail appears to only allow you to set the identity based on the account not on the folder. So if you have user+work@example.com and user+home@example.com as different IMAP folders it probably wouldn't do what you want. But if you had user-home@example.com and user-work@example.com as separate accounts then it would.
Mutt is quite flexible in this regard as you can define hooks which are executed upon a change of folder. There's a tendency for software designed to run under desktop environments to be less flexible and less amenable to script creation, but fortunately there are exceptions. My understanding is that KDE applications are typically more configurable than Gnome applications.
cat /etc/courier/maildroprc
[snip useful maildrop rules] I'm still running Procmail, but Maildrop has arguably better syntax, and indisputably better error checking.