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Right, I'm not too sure if this is possible or even where to look for info, soooo...

What I was hoping to do is setup a linux box with a user "foo" foo has an email account with gmail

Is it possible for the server to retrieve the users email from gmail using imap so that when they retrieve their email it comes from the local server instead of gmail.

Basicly this is some sort of mail caching service.

Even some info pointing me into the general area of documentation would be great!

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2 Answers

up vote 5 down vote accepted

You could use offlineimap to receive the mails from your GMail account.

Also running your own IMAP server and fetching the mail with fetchmail or getmail or generally sync the data with your GMail account (e. g. using imapsync) are viable options. Of course you have to think about syncing the changes back to GMail, e. g. what will happen if you delete a mail in your local IMAP server.

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Awesome joschi! Thats a great place for me to start! –  glisignoli Aug 14 '10 at 6:59
Avoid fetchmail. It has failure modes which lose email. getmail or offlineimap are good approaches. –  Phil P Aug 15 '10 at 0:49
My progress so far: Using getmail and dovecot it was very simple to setup a multi-user caching server! Thanks, just need to work on that synching method now :( –  glisignoli Aug 29 '10 at 10:25
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How about configuring some email client like mutt / thunderbird / kmail to retrive emails every 10 minutes from Gmail?

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mutt is designed to look at one folder at a time, so you'd then be looking at scriptinging mutt somehow. The others are heavy-weight graphical clients. There are command-line tools which are designed to sync mailboxes and nothing else. –  Phil P Aug 15 '10 at 0:48
thanks... I misunderstood the question... –  greenmang0 Aug 17 '10 at 13:33
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