Re: Home Mail Server

["Peter A. Cole" <peteracole@bigpond.com>]

> The points I can think of:
>
> 1. The mail storage type the pop3 or imap server you are going to use to
>    give your users access to their mail requires. (I use courier-imap
>    which only works with maildirs so there wasn't much choice in that
>    case).

I'm going to be using qpopper for this, which I believe will do
/var/mail/username by default, and I think you can tell it to use maildirs
if you need to.

> 2. You will need to check the pop3 protocol to see how transactions are
>    made to see if this can happen and if so look at the mail server
>    documentation to see what is actually done but potentially mboxes can
>    be download in one batch (if I remember pop3 correctly it can't be
>    done though and you do need to ask for each mail at a time), while
>    with Maildirs you need to download one file at a time. On the other
>    hand, relevant mainly with unstable connections, some clients can be
>    set up to erase each mail after download instead of deleting all
>    mails when the download is finished which saves double downloads if
>    the connection dies in the middle of the transaction.
>    With nfs mounts for the /var/mail directory there probably would be
>    an advantage to single files.
>
With Outlook Express as the client, it downloads each individual message
separately, but that's fine for me as the mail server is here on my LAN, so
interruptions to the process will be minimal.

Thanks Micha,

Pete