I'm not sure if I need to configure an Email Relay Server or what the term would be.

Scenario...

My local network has some 30 devices on it. When you take into account that a user could have A laptop, Desktop, Tablet and Smartphone, all being utilized at the same time, email polling can be rather irritating to a server. On several occasions I've encountered socket timeouts and temporary blacklists from my webserver due to the continuous stream of connections polling for mail.

What I would like to do is use my local server (Debian... current) which is essentially a ISPconfig "Perfect Server" (Apache2, BIND, Dovecot, ISPConfig 3) with SSL, an FQDN and Dyndns.... to act as an intermediate mail server. users would poll mail.mydoamin.com for email rather than mydomain.com to alleviate traffic. this would mean only one device polls the webserver for mail with a fixed interval. Some mail clients have options to poll every minute (when you gett a dozen requests for one email account every minute from the same chared IP..... the webserver doesn't like that).

So what process should I be following? Email relay server? Or would it be something else?

Thanks.

Not sure what the difference should be between all of your clients polling the "web server" or your "local server". In either case these servers are getting the same number of requests, and are going to "like" it equally well.

If you really want a local server to be the one all the clients access, to reduce latency or network bandwidth, then what you will want to do is configure your "web server" to forward all e-mails automatically to your "local server" and have your "local server" as your mail server, and the "web server" is nothing but an external forwarder.

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