Where we require a lightweight mail client, we tend to use Sylpheed (from which Claws Mail was later forked).

It seems unlikely that you would be able to add an ActiveDirectory Address Book into such a lightweight email client, and indeed the manual states:

### FIXME: write this part.

But in fact it was trivially easy:

Caveat

Whilst these instructions worked for us, do be aware that we are using Samba4 ActiveDirectory. In theory this is a drop-in replacement for Windows ActiveDirectory and these instructions should work unchanged.

Add LDAP Addressbook

Firstly run Sylpheed and go to Tools and Addressbook. Within the Sylpheed Addressbook go to File New LDAP Server You should now see a screen like this:

Having entered the Name, Hostname and Port you are able to “Check Server”, to ensure connectivity. Next either enter your Search Base, or click on the &ellipsis; button to select from the detected Search Bases.

*You should probably choose 636 when connecting via a public network, and you may need to open ports on your router.

Now select the Extended tab and you should see the following screen:

Now click on OK to finish.

Test

You should now have a Search field available, enter a colleague’s first name and Search and you should be faced with their email addresses.

Conclusion

As far as I can tell the addressbook lookup is not automatic and you have to click on the addressbook icon in the Compose Window and search for the person, in order to add them to the To: field. A bit clunky perhaps, but arguably not so very different from the need in Outlook to press Check Names to look up new addresses. Needless to say - once the address is in the recent address list, it is auto-completed in the future.

My folder layout is that I have a Spam folder, within which I have two folders - Spam/Ham and Spam/Verified. The Spam/Ham are good emails, particularly those that have been wrongly identified as Spam. The Spam/Verified are the Spam that I am confirming are definitely Spam. SpamAssassin places all the detected Spam in the Spam folder. I generally move all the Spam folder into Spam/Verified except the one or two false positives, which I move to Spam/Ham. Then overnight SpamAssassin learns from those two folders - a fairly standard SpamAssassin layout I think.

Occasionally we get Spam in our Inbox, and obviously these can be moved straight to the Spam/Verified folder.

The important factor here is that I want to be able to easily flag individual emails in my Inbox as Spam, but I also want to be able to tag the whole of my Spam folder and flag as Spam.

The manual gives a list of functions, which I used rather than the normal key bindings, as the manual advises that this is more portable and robust. I used the tag-prefix command to enable tagging. I was not using the keys H nor S, so I chose these as Ham and Spam respectively.

You need two macros for each function - one for use in the folder list (index) and one for use inside an email message (pager), so that you can flag it as Spam without moving back to the message list.

The biggest problem I encountered was the difficulty that removing the unread flag resulted in the selection moving down to the next email, and then the next email would be flagged as Spam - frustrating. The only solution seemed to be modify the muttrc configuration before and after, and almost unbelievably that is in fact possible using the function.

The final macros are shown below:

# Move message(s) to Spam/Verified by pressing "S"
macro index S "<tag-prefix><enter-command>unset resolve<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>N<tag-prefix><enter-command>set resolve<enter><tag-prefix><save-message>=INBOX/Spam/Verified<enter>" "file as Spam"
macro pager S "<save-message>=INBOX/Spam/Verified<enter>" "file as Spam"
# Move message(s) to Spam/Ham by pressing "H"
macro index H "<tag-prefix><enter-command>unset resolve<enter><tag-prefix><clear-flag>N<tag-prefix><enter-command>set resolve<enter><tag-prefix><save-message>=INBOX/Spam/Ham<enter>" "file as Ham"
macro pager H "<save-message>=INBOX/Spam/Ham<enter>" "file as Ham"
# Return to Inbox by pressing "."
macro index . "<change-folder>=INBOX<enter>" "Inbox"

Suddenly Mutt is the easiest way for me to handle by Spam.

Our Debian Lenny LTSP5 Install has hit a road block: currently the site are using a Citrix server at another location over a 256k connection to pick up their emails. I really didn’t feel that I could ask them all to collect their emails over a 256k connection, so what are the alternatives?

Well I could upgrade the bandwidth by creating an inter-site VPN, but that will still only provide perhaps 600k (that being the upload bandwidth of the host site). The solution is to move the mailserver onto the ‘net, so that they can benefit from a full 8mb ADSL download.

After seeking advice, I choose Bytemark as a trusted Debian VPS supplier, a day later I had my login to my new virtual server. But what to install? Advice pointed me in the direction of Postfix and Dovecot, which were not much more than an apt-get install:

• Debian Admin Mailserver

Great, a working mailserver, but the problem with the installation was that the users were local system accounts, which made it more cumbersome to administer. The best solution seemed to be LDAP, and I duly followed the guide Debuntu to install, and I managed to integrate LDAP with PAM thus giving me the ability to allow users to login with an LDAP account; but in a nutshell that was exactly what was wrong with this solution - the users had to login to the server, before their system account would be created, and if that was the case I might as well have stuck with local system accounts in the first place. What I needed was a true virtual mail host. To that end, I was pointed in the direction of a Ubuntu howto on Howtoforge.

Okay but this was for Ubuntu not Debian and for one reason and another I simply could not get it working. After starting from scratch a couple of times, but ending up in the same place, I found that I had to combine the howto with this one for 8.10.

Even then it took a fair amount of battling to get it working on Debian Lenny. The key to most of my problems was in reading the comments on every page, as these include invaluable corrections and suggestions.

So after a week of pain, I now have a working virtual mail host, now I just need to set-up the domains, users and mailgroups.

Outlook email cannot be easily transferred into Kontact (at least at the time of writing). There are a couple of applications that might work, but the best solution at present is to use Mozilla Thunderbird as a conduit for emails and contacts, and Outport for Calendar. At the time of writing I have found no easy solution for Notes or Tasks, so at present the only solution for these is a re-key.

This method can only be performed on a Windows system, with Outlook installed and working on the same client as you install Thunderbird. This is because Thunderbird uses Outlook itself to perform the data exchange. This means that you cannot just copy across a PST and expect Thunderbird to be able to import it - you must have a running Outlook session on the client.

Step 1 Prepare Outlook

Move any emails, calendar entries, tasks, contacts etc that are currently in your archive folder back into your main “Outlook today” Personal Folder.

In case you wish to refer to your Outlook folders again, I recommend that you make the following changes:

• Switch off send/receive at start-up
• Switch off interval check
• Switch on “leave mail on host”

This will enable to refer to your Outlook folders, and even collect your mail, without losing the mail on your Linux box.

Step 2 Outport

Download:

• http://outport.sourceforge.net/

Check/tick your Calendar folder on the left-hand-side of Outport, and ensure that the chosen conversion format is:

• Calendar: Evolution Calendar

Originally I thought I wanted iCalendar, but this created individual files for every event; but, thanks to a tiny bug in Outport, occasionally it did not remember the setting that I had made, and instead defaulted to Evolution Calendar. For ages I couldn’t understand why sometimes it would work perfectly and other times it would not! Eventually I realised what was happening and accordingly have updated these instructions. Phew!

Step 3 Thunderbird Import

Download Mozilla Thunderbird and run it.

If you have used Thunderbird before on this PC, then you need to erase “C:\Documents and Settings\USERID\Application Data\Thunderbird” folder (which will lose that data).

Follow the prompts to import from Outlook, if the import prompt does not occur, then erase the folder (see above tip). Be warned, this import process may take a long time (especially with 1gb plus pst files!)

Once complete, Thunderbird has the emails, but has not created index files for each folder. If you click on each folder it will do this for you, but I have found that it crashes if you select empty folders. Instead I have found that it is best to stay out of the folders.

Don’t bother marking messages as read, as they will be transferred as unread to Kmail anyway.

Step 4 Export Thunderbird Address Book

Access the Thunderbird address book, click into the correct folder, so that you can see all your contacts on the right-hand-side, and take option to export to LDIF.

Step 5 Transfer to Linux

Transfer the exported iCalendar file, the exported LDIF address book, and the Thunderbird data store (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\USERID\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\qmrx14h2.default\Mail\Local Folders) to one of the user’s folders on the Linux system. You’ll need to be able to access these from the user’s account, so somewhere logical might be /home/username/imported.

Step 6 Convert Address Book

Two problems with the Thunderbird exported LDIF:

• Uses “company”, whereas Kmail uses “organization” for the company name.
• Uses “cn” for contact names, whereas Kmail uses “formatted name”.

You can change these manually, or a simple script:

Example script

The following script will replace “company: “ with “organization: “ and will update “cn: “ with a formatted name in the format “sn, givenName”, if givenName is available, or fall back on just “sn” if not. This worked for us, but you might have to tailor this to your requirements.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# thunder2kab
# Converts Thunderbird LDIF file into Kmail LDIF format

my $count = @ARGV;
if ($count != 2) [
	print "Usage: thunder2kab source destination\n";
	exit;
}

PrivoxyWindowOpen(IN, $ARGV[0]) ](| die "Cannot open $ARGV[0] for reading: $!";
PrivoxyWindowOpen(OUT, ">$ARGV[1]") || die "Cannot create $ARGV[1] for writing: $!";

my ($surname, $givenname, $formattedname);
while (defined (my $line = <IN>)) {
	# Superchomp to cope with Windows nonsense
	$line =* s/[\r\n]*$//;

	# givenName: Terry
	# sn: McCarthy

	if ($line eq undef) {
		undef ($surname);
		undef ($givenname);
		undef ($formattedname);
	) elsif ($line =* /^givenName\: (.+)$/) {
		$givenname = $1;
	} elsif ($line =* /^sn\: (.+)$/) {
		$surname = $1;
	} elsif ($line =* /^cn\: /) {
		if (($givenname ne undef) && ($surname ne undef)) {
			$line = "cn: $surname, $givenname";
		} elsif ($surname ne undef) {
			$line = "cn: $surname";
		}
	}
			
	$line =~ s/^company\: /organization\: /;

	print OUT $line, "\n";

}

close (OUT) || die "Cannot close $ARGV[1]: $!";
close (IN) || die "Cannot close $ARGV[0]: $!";

exit;

Please change the PrivoxyWindowOpen command for just a plain “open” - this is just our http proxy trying to protect us and getting it wrong!

Step 7 Import into Kontact

Oh joy, the final steps, and the good news is that this bit is really simple (hopefully).

• Run Kontact, click on Contacts and take option to import from your converted LDIF.
• Click on Mail and take opion to import from Thunderbird mail structure.
• Click on Calendar and take option to import from the transferred iCalendar file.

1. If your mailserver is running IMAP, then what are you doing here? Just connect your Linux mail client to your IMAP server and you’re good to go!
2. If you are running a common mail client on Windows, then consider installing Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows and importing your emails into that… a. See Transfer Emails from Microsoft Outlook
3. If you are running Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows, then you can simply copy the files onto Linux and use Mozilla Thunderbird on Linux - job done.
4. If your Windows email client stores in mbox format (unlikely) then again you should be able to simply copy the mail store to Linux.
5. Check whether you have any export options and see if you can export into an easier format, e.g. Thunderbird/MBOX.
6. If your Windows email client does not support IMAP, then you will need to upgrade it to a more recent version that does before proceeding.
7. If your Windows email client does support IMAP, then let’s continue…

Install Courier-IMAP on server

See Install Courier-IMAP Server

Create LTSP User

In KUserManager create the user, and add to the following groups:

• kiosk-standard
• Staff
• Users
• Fuse (only if you want them to be able to access USB devices)
• Saned (only if you want them to be able to use scanning)

Take a note of UID and GID before exiting KUserManager

Create IMAP Account

You need to have installed an IMAP server first - see page Install Courier-IMAP Server

$ sudo userdb USERNAME set uid=9999 gid=9999 shell=/bin/bash home=/opt/imap-mail/USERNAME

*Replace USERNAME and 9999 for actual username, uid and gid

$ sudo userdbpw -md5 | sudo userdb USERNAME set systempw
$ sudo mkdir -p /opt/imap-mail/USERNAME
$ sudo maildirmake /opt/imap-mail/USERNAME/Maildir
$ sudo chown -R 9999:9999 /opt/imap-mail/USERNAME
$ sudo makeuserdb
$ sudo /etc/init.d/courier-authdaemon stop
$ sudo /etc/init.d/courier-imap stop
$ sudo /etc/init.d/courier-authdaemon start
$ sudo /etc/init.d/courier-imap start

*Replace USERNAME and 9999 for actual username, uid and gid

Key steps

The rest of the process is simple enough, that hopefully I do not need to go through it in detail. Briefly:

• Install Courier-IMAP Server
• Create IMAP account in Windows email client
• Log onto LTSP
• Kontact → Mail → Create IMAP account
• Transfer each mail folder into IMAP Inbox then transfer each IMAP folder into Kmail folder
• Repeat last step for each folder

Change each client to work off-line between transfers - you don’t really want both clients connected to the same IMAP mailbox at the same time

Oddly enough, there is no option, when browsing folders, to right-click and send by email - something Windows users take for granted. Fortunately this omission may be easily corrected as follows.

These instructions are for Kmail, if you are not using Kmail (or KDE Kontact PIM) then these instructions will need to be modified for the command line of your email client.

Installation

Create the following file and save as “kmail.desktop” in the folder /usr/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus (for all users on your system).

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
ServiceTypes=all/allfiles
Actions=Email;

[Desktop Action Email]
Name=Send file(s) with KMail
Exec=kmail --attach %F
Icon=kmail