Getmail: possible to set "per Host" deletion period?

[tilllt]

I am collecting mail from several imap hosts via getmail for local delivery into DMS. As a fallback i keep the messages on the original services for a week. I tried to set individual getmail options per hosts, but that doesnt seem to work: can i only set the same options like retention period for all configured getmail hosts in DMS? Or is it possible to make a per host [options] section somehow?

Specifically i mean
delete = true
delete_after = 7

as mentioned in the getmail docs:
https://getmail6.org/configuration.html

[polarathene]

If it can be done with the software without DMS involved, it should be viable with DMS.

Looking over our docs for Getmail we have a base block of settings which includes delete = false, but I would expect a delete = true line after that would overwrite it, if not we could probably fix that.

When you say you tried to set individual options, how did you go about that? Just adding the setting to specific remote account .cf getmail configs? Did you make sure to docker compose up --force-recreate so that a fresh DMS container was setup? That is sometimes necessary to apply config changes properly.

If you did that, you can try add your owngetmail/getmailrc_general.cf to the DMS config volume, take a copy of this config settings from our docs and remove the delete = false line, then try with one of your account configs using delete = true.

Other than that, there are some settings that getmail would offer that DMS does not yet as we don't have the latest version installed but instead the version that is packaged for Debian 12. One of those I think was to toggle read status on the remote inbox, which would match what fetchmail supports.

[casperklein]

Or is it possible to make a per host [options] section somehow?

Out of the box, no.

The DMS integration for Getmail generates a getmailrc config (or if present, use the custom getmailrc_general.cf) that prepends the common options of the base config to each remote account config file (*.cf) found in the DMS Config Volume getmail/ directory.

You can check the resulting configs in the container directory /etc/getmailrc.d/.

You can try this quick and dirty approach: Put these lines at the top of your remote-account1.cf file:

delete = true
delete_after = 7

After you recreate the container, the file /etc/getmailrc.d/remote-account1.cf, would look similar to:

[options]
verbose = 0
read_all = false
delete = false
max_messages_per_session = 500
received = false
delivered_to = false

delete = true
delete_after = 7
[retriever]
type = SimpleIMAPSSLRetriever
server = imap.gmail.com
username = alice
password = notsecure
[destination]
type = MDA_external
path = /usr/lib/dovecot/deliver
allow_root_commands = true
arguments =("-d","[email protected]")

If you are lucky, getmail takes the second delete = true statement (overriding the first one).

---

If that doesn't work, you can use user-patches.sh. This approach will completely ignore the default settings from getmailrc_general.cf:

Put the complete configuration as you like in each *.cf file and let user-patches.sh copy those files to /etc/getmailrc.d/:

#!/bin/bash
echo "Deleting generated getmail configs"
rm -f /etc/getmailrc.d/*

echo "Copy getmail configs to /etc/getmailrc.d/"
find /tmp/docker-mailserver/getmail -name '*.cf' -not -name 'getmailrc_general.cf' -exec cp -v {} /etc/getmailrc.d/ \;

chmod -R 600 /etc/getmailrc.d