public-inbox-watch1

Usage

Overview

public-inbox-watch allows watching a mailbox or newsgroup for the arrival of new messages and automatically importing them into public-inbox git repositories and indices. public-inbox-watch is useful in situations when a user wishes to mirror an existing mailing list, but has no access to run public-inbox-mda(1) on a server. Unlike public-inbox-mda which is invoked once per-message, public-inbox-watch is a persistent process, making it faster for after-the-fact imports of large Maildirs.

Upon startup, it scans the mailbox for new messages to be imported while it was not running.

As of public-inbox 1.6.0, Maildirs, IMAP folders, and NNTP newsgroups are supported. Previous versions of public-inbox only supported Maildirs.

public-inbox-watch should be run inside a screen(1) session or as a systemd(1) service. Errors are emitted to stderr.

Options

public-inbox-watch takes no command-line options.

Configuration

These configuration knobs should be used in the public-inbox-config(5) file

publicinbox.<name>.watch

A location to watch. public-inbox 1.5.0 and earlier only supported "maildir:" paths:

        [publicinbox "test"]
                watch = maildir:/path/to/maildirs/.INBOX.test/

public-inbox 1.6.0 supports "nntp://", "nntps://", "imap://" and "imaps://" URLs:

                watch = nntp://news.example.com/inbox.test.group
                watch = imaps://[email protected]/INBOX.test

This may be specified multiple times to combine several mailboxes into a single public-inbox. URLs requiring authentication will require netrc(5) and/or git-credential(1) (preferred) to fill in the username and password.

Default: none

publicinbox.<name>.watchheader

        [publicinbox "test"]
                watchheader = List-Id:<test.example.com>

If specified, public-inbox-watch(1) will only process mail matching the given header. If specified multiple times in public-inbox 1.5 or later, mail will be processed if it matches any of the values. Only the last value was used in public-inbox 1.4 and earlier.

Default: none

publicinboxwatch.spamcheck

This may be set to "spamc" to enable the use of SpamAssassin spamc(1) for filtering spam before it is imported into git history. Other spam filtering backends may be supported in the future.

Default: none

publicinboxwatch.watchspam

A Maildir to watch for confirmed spam messages to appear in. Messages which appear in this folder with the (S)een flag will be hidden from all configured inboxes based on Message-ID and content matching.

Messages without the (S)een flag are not considered for hiding. This hiding affects all configured public-inboxes in PI_CONFIG.

As with "publicinbox.$NAME.watch", "imap://" and "imaps://" URLs are supported in public-inbox 1.6.0+.

Default: none; only for public-inbox-watch(1) users

imap.Starttls / imap.$URL.Starttls

Whether or not to use "STARTTLS" on plain "imap://" connections.

May be specified for certain URLs via "--get-urlmatch" in git-config(1) in git(1) 1.8.5+.

Default: "true"

imap.Compress / imap.$URL.Compress

Whether or not to use the IMAP COMPRESS (RFC4978) extension to save bandwidth. This is not supported by all IMAP servers and some advertising this feature may not implement it correctly.

May be specified only for certain URLs if git(1) 1.8.5+ is installed to use "--get-urlmatch" in git-config(1)

Default: "false"

nntp.Starttls / nntp.$URL.Starttls

Whether or not to use "STARTTLS" on plain "nntp://" connections.

May be specified for certain URLs via "--get-urlmatch" in git-config(1) in git(1) 1.8.5+.

Default: "false" if the hostname is a Tor ".onion", "true" otherwise

Signals

Environment

PI_CONFIG

config file. default: ~/.public-inbox/config See public-inbox-config(5)

PERL_INLINE_DIRECTORY

This may affect any public-inbox processes, but is intended for long-lived ones such as "public-inbox-watch" or network daemons. See public-inbox-daemon(8).

Contact

Feedback welcome via plain-text mail to <mailto:[email protected]>

The mail archives are hosted at <https://public-inbox.org/meta/> and <http://4uok3hntl7oi7b4uf4rtfwefqeexfzil2w6kgk2jn5z2f764irre7byd.onion/meta/>