On Sat,28.Mar.09, 17:19:24, Daniel Dalton wrote: > On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 11:08:36PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote: > > Instead of complicating things, set up an imap server for storage and > > your MTA as a relay host. > > Okay. So as I understand it: > - All messages are stored on a server, the server has tools to receive > the mail from my isp > - I can then access the server with clients, from anywhere in the world. ... > Ah right, so the imap does actually send the mail? For your use case there are 3 somewhat separate jobs to do: 1. Retrieve mail and deliver it to some accessible store. Traditionally this has been done with fetchmail, but getmail is also a very good alternative. 1a. You could use an intermediate step to filter/sort the incoming mail. Again the traditional tool is procmail, but have a look at maildrop 2. Make the mails available to the software reading it (the MUA). In most cases it should be enough to point your software to the respective mailstore, possibly telling it to check for new stuff every 5 minutes or so. Alternatively you could use an IMAP server (dovecot for example) which makes the content of the mailstore available via the IMAP protocol. Most clients in use today should be able to use that, and if the client and server are on the same machine the speed penalty is not an issue. This has the added advantage that it will work over the network, be it local or internet. You can also put a webmail software on top of the IMAP server to create your own mini-webmail server. Of course, for this to work over the internet your mailserver needs to be accessible, for example by forwarding the respective ports on your router. 3. The mails composed in the client or the webmail software has to be sent. For this you need a sendmail-like software. There are many options here. You could either go with a full blown MTA (exim is Debian's default, postfix is the competitor) or a mini-MTA like msmtp. The full-MTAs will accept mail over the network (or just point the client to localhost if on the same machine) and will even queue it for later delivery in case the recipient server is not available. The mini-MTAs usually can only send by providing a 'sendmail' binary which clients on the same machine can use. Sending from another machine on your local network is not possible (I don't know about the webmail softwares). Hope this wasn't too long ;) Regards, Andrei -- If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. (Albert Einstein)
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