[Off Topic] Ideas on providing low cost email access to schools
[I would appreciate it if you Cc-ed your replies to this thread to me]
#include <offtopic.h>
Folks,
I am planning on writing an article for a computer magazine in India
[1]. This magazine is big supporter of Linux in India. I thought of
writing an article on how high schools and colleges with non-dedicated
connections to each other could provide basic internet access [2] to its
students.
Basic Idea
^^^^^^^^^^^
The schools will be connected to each other with "hubs" in the various
regions. These "hubs" typically would have dedicated connections
(leased lines). The schools have departmental LANs with windows (3.1
and '95) machines. Basically, the departments will be providing the
students with accounts on their POP/SMTP (Linux) servers. The students
would use a POP/SMTP capable client to connect to the server and
download and upload their emails.
Outgoing Mail
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
The Linux machine will queue all the outgoing mail. This Linux machine
will then dial another school or hub (via. PPP) during the off-peak
hours and send out the emails from the queue. The hubs which have
dedicated connections will then take care of sending out the emails to
the recipients.
Incoming Mail
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
An email bound for foo.edu.in will reach the hub (bar.net.in) and will
be queued there. When foo.edu.in connects to bar.net.in to send out
outgoing email, bar will instruct foo to download the incoming email.
Questions
^^^^^^^^^
1. Has something like this been implemented elsewhere? It would be nice
if I had more actual technical details on how this has been implemented.
2. I have a pretty good knowledge of how to take care of the outgoing
mail scenario. I am a bit hazy on how the hub would queue mails coming
to foo. How can the MTA be configured in bar to wait for foo to
connect?
3. Are there out of the box solutions available? Do any of the MTAs
support this kind of stuff? I don't want to write custom scripts. I
prefer a solution that needs minimal maintenance.
4. I want to stay with TCP/IP. uucp is not a solution for me.
Footnotes
[1] PCQuest - http://www.pcquest.com/
[2] I am defining basic internet access as email for starters. If a
school has a dedicated internet connection this will include NNTP, FTP
and HTTP access.
Thanks in advance for your input.
Thaths
--
Homer: Oh Lisa! There's no record of a hurricane ever hitting
Springfield.
Lisa: Yes, but the records only go back to 1978 when the Hall of
Records was mysteriously blown away.
Sudhakar C13n http://people.netscape.com/thaths/ Indentured Slave
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