[TriLUG] Alpine and webmail for trilug members

[Alan Porter]

On 03/12/2013 10:56 AM, Roy Vestal wrote:
> I tried alpine from login.trilug.org today and it said my mail isn't there. I tried the webmail as per the member FAQ and it's not working. Has this changed?
>
> -Roy

I am not sure what Alpine is expecting.  On pilot, we have an IMAP 
server that stores your mail in Maildir format in your $HOME/Maildir .

In 2009, pilot was compromised, and so I rebuilt it from scratch at that 
time.  Before then, the mail directories were in a different place, 
somewhere outside of user's homes, something like /var/lib/cyrus.  If 
you have not used email on pilot since next-to-forever, it might be 
looking in the old place.

Now I see that the FAQ contains a lot of pre-2009 info.  For example:

  * We are NOT running Cyrus IMAPd, we are running dovecot.
  * The sieve link does not work (instead, you set up sieve rules in
    your own $HOME/.sieve file).
  * The link to the webmail client does not work for two reasons: (1)
    all HTTPS traffic on pilot gets directed to the steering wiki and
    (2) we never reinstalled RoundCube after the break-in in 2009
    because that was the package that the intruders used to get in.

Sorry for the outdated info on the wiki.  It's a bit of a surprise that 
we have not heard complaints in the last 4 years.

Right now, the only external access to trilug.org email is IMAPS. From 
the shell, several users have had good luck with mutt.  I'd bet alpine 
could also work OK, but you'd need to configure it to access your mail 
store at either the IMAP the address or the local storage in $HOME/Maildir.

-- 
# Alan Porter