Hotway(d) Solution

[Old Rocker]

In the repositories there is a very useful program called hotway.  This 
acts as a "gateway" to certain webmail services so your email program 
can pull mail into a pop3 account.  Once installed, it becomes hotwayd, 
and can run as a daemon.

However, there are problems with using this program in ubuntu as it 
seems not set up to use either inetd or xinetd (either a required 
dependency) in the same way other distributions do.  The website where 
you can obtain documentation for hotwayd is 
http://hotwayd.sourceforge.net, but its not up and you get this when 
you go there:

"CRITICAL_ERROR: 
Line : generic, class2.php

Error reported as: [6]: Unable to form a valid connection to mySQL. 
Please check that your e107_config.php contains the correct 
information."

So here is a short history of what I did to get hotwayd going :-)

First of all, get what documentation there is.  There is a tarball which 
you can download from:

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/hotwayd/hotwayd-0.8.2.tar.gz?download

Once extracted you will see a number of files which could give you some 
clues as to what is going on and how to solve it.

The documentation will tell you that you need xinetd installed (although 
you can find documentation for inetd at the hotwayd website which you 
can't access!).  I tried installing xinetd and hotwayd STILL wouldn't 
work, so I almost gave up and removed xinetd, planning to install inetd 
back again through apt-get.

In fact, apt-get suggested I install a package called netkit-inetd, and 
once I did this, hotwayd started working.  If you are thinking about 
installing hotwayd, I suggest you install this package first.  You can 
check that hotwayd is up and running by doing (in a console):

telnet 127.0.0.1 110

and you should see this:

$ telnet 127.0.0.1 110
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to 127.0.0.1.
Escape character is '^]'.
+OK POP3 hotwayd v0.8.2 -> The POP3-HTTPMail Gateway. Server on ubuntu 
active.

Now, with this running as a daemon you can set up any mail accounts for 
Hotmail, MSN, and Lycos and have them imported into your email program.  
Hotmail can even download its bulkmail folder so you can clear things 
out.  Here's how (these examples are for hotmail):

First, set up your email program as usual and set up your account as a 
pop3 account. Give the user name as your whole email address, for 
example, BillGates at hotmail.com.  Your password will be your hotmail 
password.

The incoming server will be 127.0.0.1

The port will be 110 (although this can be changed in the hotwayd 
configuration file).

If you want to download you bulkmail folder, you will have to set up a 
separate account inside your email program with a user name of, for 
example, BillGates at hotmail.com/bulkmail

Using KMail (as I do) you can download mail and have it scanned by 
bogofilter or spamassassin, and designate it as spam or ham for future 
downloads.  Very useful!

Use an existing outgoing server as the one for sending mail.

Hope this is of help to others

-- 

Old Rocker