Fetch mails from external POP3 server

Hi, internally to our company we use an email address which is associated to a POP3 account (say pop.provider.com). We would like to use IMAP for mails, but provider.com doesn't support that.

I thought it should be possible to use WebFaction to fetch mail periodically (e.g., every 5 minutes) from provider.com via POP, and provide IMAP access via WF to our mail client. At this point I'd change the mail client settings to access WebFaction IMAP server for incoming mails instead of provider.com's POP3. For outgoing mails we'll continue to use provider.com's SMTP.

AFAIK WebFaction doesn't offer a such fetching service out-of-the-box, instead it's required a program/script doing that.

Do anyone of you have an idea about how that script could look like and work? Or maybe something ready to use already exist?

Thanks.

pop3 mail imap

asked 26 Jun '12, 01:27

Guandalino
37●1●13●18
accept rate: 0%

2 Answers:

active answers oldest answers newest answers popular answers

I think you'll need a tool like pop2imap, which is specifically designed to download POP mail and upload it to an IMAP server.

It appears to require a number of perl dependencies which we do not have installed, so you'll need to follow our Perl documentation to install whatever it needs.

Hope that helps!

permanent link

answered 26 Jun '12, 14:05

seanf
12.2k●4●21●36
accept rate: 37%

It's FANTASTIC, thanks. Works like a charm. Consider add this resource to the docs.

(27 Jun '12, 05:07) Guandalino

You can search online for 'POP3 to imap' copy scripts. One paid one I found was here. There are also some free ones, fetchmail, getmail.

I have not personally tried any of these, normally when I need to do this it is with 2 IMAP severs in which case I use imapcopy.

permanent link

answered 26 Jun '12, 01:47

johns
5.4k●4●12
accept rate: 23%

I installed getmail in my home and did the configuration to retrieve from POP without issues. Though, it's a bit hard to me to configure the [destination] section, ie. where the mails have to be sent once fetched. These are the main choices: Maildir, Mboxrd and MDA_external. Which path should I specify in case of Maildir or Mboxrd? Thank you.

(26 Jun '12, 05:08) Guandalino

OK, now I have the mails offline in ~/Maildir/new but I have no idea about how to read them from WF IMAP server. Any suggestion?

(26 Jun '12, 05:24) Guandalino

I don't think getmail or fetchmail will work for you in this case. Those tools will fetch mail and store it on the machine where it is run, but your IMAP mailboxes are on a separate mail server, and you can't run scripts there. I'm posting a second answer with a different tool that you can use.

(26 Jun '12, 14:02) seanf

Your answer

toggle preview

community wiki:

Follow this question

By Email:

Once you sign in you will be able to subscribe for any updates here

By RSS:

Answers

Answers and Comments

Markdown Basics

*italic* or _italic_
**bold** or __bold__
link:[text](http://url.com/ "title")
image?![alt text](/path/img.jpg "title")
numbered list: 1. Foo 2. Bar
to add a line break simply add two spaces to where you would like the new line to be.
basic HTML tags are also supported

learn more about Markdown

Question tags:

mail ×70
imap ×22
pop3 ×3

question asked: 26 Jun '12, 01:27

question was seen: 3,891 times

last updated: 27 Jun '12, 05:07

Fetch mails from external POP3 server

Follow this question

Related questions