IMAP forwarder

Question

I'm wondering what is the quickest and most reliable way to forward mail from an IMAP account.

My university does not allow our student-mailbox to forward to a private e-mail account (everybody uses either Gmail or Hotmail here). It's a political thing, not technical. We do have IMAP access to the mailbox. I would like to have a service which downloads the mail through IMAP, and forwards. And it would be nice to scale it, so thousands of students can use it. Eventually, I want to build a public signup page, and have it processed automatically from there.

So far, I've made a decent PHP script which connects, downloads headers and body parts, and ties it all together. I have two problems with that.

1) I'm downloading all kind of parts, and sticking them back together. I hope that every exotic attached file, weird encoded piece of text and every type of header survives this. I'm not even sure I have the complete header.

2) The to: e-mail address becomes the private e-mail address, not the original student e-mail address. I think this is lame, and inconvenient in searching and archiving.

Is the PHP script the way to go? Is there a trick using a particular linux mail service/daemon? Does IMAP have a 'forward' command, I'm missing?

Answer 1

You might want to look at Fetchmail, as this sounds like the problem it was designed to solve. Fetchmail retrieves mail from POP/IMAP/etc servers and forwards it to SMTP/LMTP/etc servers. Fetchmail has the advantage of a few years and lots of users ironing out problems with various IMAP servers.

Answer 2

Fetchmail seems like the way to go. I can use PHP to generate/edit a fetchmail command file, so that will cover the public sign-up. I'm looking for a package/script who allready does this.

The Gmail pull only works with POP3, not with IMAP.

Answer 3

If using Gmail you can configure GMAIL to pick up mail from other accounts.