How do I set up a Mail Server
 

I was wondering if anyone knows how to set up a mail server for a local network. The computer will be running Redhat 9, and will have an ISDN connection. I want to be able to connect to the Internet, download all e-mails from one address (which actually receives mail from about 5 accounts), and disconnect. Then when a user from another computer on the local network needs his/her email, they just need to log onto the linux computer and it will send the relevant emails to his program, probably Outlook Express.

I have already tried setting up sendmail, Exim, etc. but cant seem to get anything working. Maybe someone can tell me how they set up their mail server step by step...

PLEASE HELP!!!

Thanks

Jamie Barrow
Proudly South African

not gonna really get a step by step thing really as it's a potentially endless thing a "mail" server.

bit by bit though:

downloading email from a remote account: fetchmail (or gotmail for crappy hotmail accounts)
reading mail locally from a unix mail file: pine / mutt / elm
reading mail from a network machine: imap / pop3
sending mail out from the server: exim / sendmail / postfix
accepting mail from the net: exim / sendmail / postfix
sorting mail to correct local accounts: procmail / exim

i like exim, it's really really easy and does it's job well.

with all of these things you should be able to set each one up totally independantly from another one, and it's the bigger picture your looking at when you call it a "mail server". Having monolithic solutions for somethign like this is seldom a good thing. you know that... you've used windows... ;-)

OK, I have sendmail/exim/postfix, or whatever MTA, but its the setting up of sendmail that is the problem.

Do you mean setting it up so that it only checks periodically (on a dial out thing)? So basically you wanna sorta run it as a cron job to:
dial out
startup postfix/sendmail/exim/qmail
send your mail
hang up
And then to fetchmail:
periodically dial out
start fetchmail to fetch existing mail from existing account somewhere in cyberspace
hang up
sort mail
Read.

Am I correct? Or could you, in a similar fashion, explain your desire?

Cool

sendmail is nasty to set up, like i said above, i recommend using exim instead. MasterC seems to like Postfix

and of course the best way to configure something properly is to read the documentation that comes with it. I know exim's docs are superb.

And VERY in depth (I was just reading over them, it doesn't seem to miss a thing!).

I like how well Postfix is documented as well, it's extremely easy to setup from the included documentation, and seems to perform well. But...

I've not setup a mail server to handle mail on a dial-up basis, so that is where the trick is going to come in. I can walk you through setting up postfix, but setting it up to work on a per-mail-dial-up basis is the tricky part. And then to setup fetchmail as a cron-job probably won't be bad either, just have a dial out connection first, then have fetch start.

So I think first up, you will want to decide which MTA you want to use (Exim, Postfix, Sendmail, Qmail) and the read up on the documentation for it to get it setup. After all that's finished, you will then want to start learning how to tweak your mail server to work with your dial-up connection.

Cool

Thanks everyone. Will try to read the documentation (might take a while) and hopefully its as easy as it is now sounding.

Well it's only easy for us (and easy for us to make it sound easy ;) ) because we've done it, and probably more than once ( I know I have ). So if you get hung up again, feel free to post back, that's where our experience kicks in ;)

Cool