Re: MTA help

[Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net>]

On Mon, 2003-11-10 at 17:07, Eric Walstad wrote:
> Greetings kind debianites,
> 
> I'm in the process of learning MTA admin.  My head is about to explode.
> 
> I'm wanting to setup a Debian box that'll suck down pop email from an 
> ISP for a few local users and then serve those email up via pop3 or 
> imap on the LAN.  Following some advice I received on this list, I 
> installed fetchmail, courier-imap, courier-pop and exim4.  I then found 
> that exim4 and courier like different mailbox formats.  I couldn't find 
> a way to make exim4 work with courier's maildir format, so I figured 
> I'd replace exim4 with courier-mta.  Now fetchmail and courier-mta are 
> fighting (courieresmtp throws an ERROR 513, syntax error, when 
> fetchmail tries to forward an email) over addresses like 
> "ewalstad@localhost".
> 
> So, I'm stuck.  I haven't had any luck in figuring out how to fix 
> courier and I don't know how to fix exim4.
> 
> Any sage bits of advice are appreciated.

fetchmail shouldn't be forwarding email; it should pass it it
through port 25 to your MTA.

How does fetchmail get email from weird addresses like
ewalstad@localhost?  Sounds like that should be passed to port
25 directly by an MUA running on, well, localhost.

I've got this setup for my LAN:
- fetchmail 6.2.4-1 grabs email from my & my wife's pop mailboxes,
  and passes it to postfix 2.0.16-2.
- postfix filters it through SpamAssassin 2.60-2, and then uses
  maildrop 1.5.3-1 to place each email in Maildir sub-directories
  under /home on my machine.
- courier-imap 1.7.3-10 then feeds the mail to any client anywhere
  on the LAN that has the right password for each individual user.

1st thing is to remove fetchmail, and get your MTA installed and
working, so that you can do something like:
$ echo 'testing 123' | mail -s 'a test' foo
and have it show up in /var/mail/foo.

Next is to set up fetchmail to get it to pass email from the ISP
to your MTA and drop it in /var/mail/$USER.

Next is to install courier-imap and use maildirmake to create mail-
dirs on the *mail server* under the $HOME of each user.  Thus, an
account will have to be created on the mail server for each user.
(Virtual IMAP servers are possible, but overkill in your situation.)
Then, with a slight change to your MTA's config file(s), you tell
it to drop the email in Maildir/ instead of /var/mail/$USER.
After you restart your MTA, another quick test should verify if 
you see new files in the /home/$USER/Maildir/new of the user that
you sent a test email to.
(If you use a GUI email client, each $USER easily be able to drag-
and-drop the emails in his /var/mail/$USER file to his /home/$USER/
Maildir/cur file.  The internals will be hidden, though.)

Then, you can get SpamAssassin installed and integrated into your
MTA.

Lastly, you can install a server-side filter like maildrop or the
more popular procmail, which can drop the emails in Maildir/ sub-
directories that you create with 'maildirmake -f'.

NOTE: to make a Maildir/ for joe, you'll have to 'su joe' and go
to joe's $HOME.

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Ron Johnson, Jr. ron.l.johnson@cox.net
Jefferson, LA USA

296,443 sq mi (767,787 sq km) are needed for 6 billion people to
live at the same population density as Manhattan, New York.
That is ~ Arizona or Nevada.
Alternatively, that ~ double the size of Japan or Zimbabwe