Re: Gnus Access mail spool by ssh

[Nuutti Kotivuori <nuutti.kotivuori@sonera.com>]

"Harry" == Harry Putnam <reader@newsguy.com> writes:
> [ also posted to freebsd-mobil list]
> 
> I have ssh-1.2.27 installed and use it extensively.  In fact I've set
> my machines (personal at home machines) to only allow connections via
> ssh.
> 
> Now I want to have a laptop running FreeBSD 4.0 networked to desktop
> running Redhat linux, be able to  view/manipulate mail on the parent machine
> but don't want to  setup pop, imap or  special sendmail stuff.  I
> don't want more daemons running that can be exploited from the internet.
> And haven't really looked into firewall technique.

<snip>

> I have ssh-agent setup and do understand how to avoid password
> problems during connections. (Thanks Kai)

Um. I have a similar problem. But my problem was that I wanted to
store all my mail folders on my server and on my laptop, including
sent mail - and still be able to read and send mail offline.

Firstly, there is no need to run an imap daemon lessening security,
since it can be run directly from a shell as well. The imap server
starts up as preauthenticated then, and ofcourse if it's run thru ssh,
the whole connection is encrypted. So, if you want to just fetch mail
from the spool (INBOX?), you can do something similar to my fetchmail
scripts. (The current script uses an identity without a passphrase
which only allows access to the imap daemon, but it can be changed to
whatever ofcourse)

bin/fetchmail-imap-wrapper:
exec ssh -i $HOME/.ssh/identity-imap -l xxxxx $1 /opt/net/etc/imapd

.fetchmailrc:
poll xxxxx with proto IMAP and options no dns
       preauth ssh plugin /usr/home/xxxxx/bin/fetchmail-imap-wrapper

I think this can be easily adapted into mail-sources fetching, correct
if I'm wrong though, but I'm not so sure about nnimap. If it can be
adapted to nnimap, you can effectively share mailboxes with your
server and use gnus-agent to download the articles to local storage,
possibly using a cache as well.

I'm going to experiment more on the remote accessing thru IMAP soon
enough, when I move my mail again.

-- Naked