Re: Mail Server Questions

[Arias Hung <radio@m-a-g.net>]

On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Phil Bardanes wrote:

> Hi, noob here. 
> 
> We have five machines running various OSes (only one Windows box) with a
> Debian sarge business server on our private network. Everything is run
> through a dedicated firewall using iptables rules for NAT, packet
> filtering, port forwarding, etc. We also have a public server for our
> public website. We are using a shared dynamic IP and dyndns.org.
> 
> I know very little about setting up mail servers, but I can figure out
> the set up of the actual software. The problem is whether the software
> will do what I want. This is what I want to do, and I want to start out
> in a way that I can understand. I think that I just want to set up a
> POP/IMAP server only. I do not want a domain associated with the
> mailserver. 
> 
> I want to set up the mail server to check and download email for all of
> our accounts from various POP servers and store it on our business
> server on our private network. 

For this, use fetchmail and if you want a delivery agent to hand off to that will sort it in individual Mail directories rather than leaving it in the spool have procmail installed and configured for this too.  Or, you could leave the procmail config up to the individual users depending on how they wish to sort their incoming mail.  But in either case, have procmail installed.  


Then, each user can download his/her
> email for the given account from the business server at whatever point
> they want. I want them to have the capability of leaving mail on the
> business server or removing it (IMAP/POP). 

Cool, IMAP4 take your pick of cyrus or UW, and POP3 just as you guessed.  Matter or preference on which IMAP server, if you want email divided into many small files, each representing one email, install cyrus with maildirs, if not uw imap4 would be fine.  

> 
> For sending mail, I just want to use our ISP's smtp server, so I do not
> need a smtp server. I can just use the local machine's MTA to send the
> mail. So, the send process can bypass the mail server.

You have your choice of 
> 
> How would you suggest that I do this? Would sendmail, exim, qmail do
> this? Are there any links that cover this that you would suggest?

you have your choice of out the box exim that comes preinstalled, or something like qmail or postfix that doesn't run as root.  Within this mta, you can config remote smtp server for use.

so in summary

fetchmail
procmail
exim|postfix|qmail

and if you're going to run a local mail reader like mutt or pine, you'll want to install that also.