An APT repository is now available for manitou-mail, with the latest manitou-mdx packages for amd64 and i386 architectures.

Create /etc/apt/sources.list.d/manitou.list with these contents:

# for Debian 7 or 8
deb http://manitou-mail.org/apt/ jessie main
# for Ubuntu 14.04 and other current versions
deb http://manitou-mail.org/apt/ trusty main

(the distribution codename is obtained from `lsb_release -c` )

then run:

apt-get update
apt-get install manitou-mdx

The first time, the installer now asks if it should install the database.

Screenshot: configurin manitou-mdx

When choosing Yes, it creates a new database as indicated (assuming a default PostgreSQL cluster is up and running), and auto-starts (configured in /etc/default/manitou-mdx)

The default source of mail defined in /etc/manitou-mdx.conf is also the Maildir directory for manitou as a user (/var/lib/manitou/Maildir). Then if the system is configured to use Maildir, messages directed to the local address manitou@localhost will end up directly into the database.

Hopefully, these changes will make it easier to start with manitou-mdx compared to the previous versions of the package.

On Debian, the default maildrop destination is still mbox files (/var/mail/$USER), and delivery happens through procmail. maildir is always a better choice. With procmail, this is configurable by putting in /etc/procmailrc:

DEFAULT=$HOME/Maildir/

If not using procmail, for example if postfix is responsible for the maildrop, set in /etc/postfix/main.cf

home_mailbox = Maildir/

See https://wiki.debian.org/MaildirConfiguration for more details.