Hi folks,
We have a requirement to bring down the bandwidth usage between our office and our mail server on the internet. Currently there are 50 machines concurrently accessing mails directly from the internet which reduces our internet speed to a crawl and browsing becomes difficult. Is it possible to create a local mail archive server where all the mails get deposited from the mail server on the internet so that our users can access the mails from within the intranet rather than all accessing the internet for the mails. if so how? please help

Hi vishyc88, I see the problem and yes, there are certainly ways to address it. However I'd encourage you to give a few more details about your systems such as the following, so that someone can offer specific advice:

First, what MTA (mail server software) are you running on the remote system? Is it sendmail, exim, postfix ..?
What method (e.g. IMAP4) do your users use to retrieve their mails? Etc. Please let us know what the setup is.

Also, the correct solution will depend on what kind of bottleneck your users are experiencing. For example is it mostly about accessing old mails that are stored on the server, in which case fetching them periodically (e.g. overnight) to be stored locally might help? Or is it that lots of users need access to new mails as they come in? Then realtime mirroring or forwarding could be looked at instead, which could spread the load although there might still be bandwidth issues. There are a lot of ways to approach it so which is best will depend on the pattern of usage.

Hope that helps,

You could use a pop3 downloader and then use a mail sorter like proc mail. Either way you will need to have a way to download or intercept the email. You could create a postfix smtp on a hosted virtual server and point your mx record to this server. You could then use sftp to copy the received mail down to your local box.

Well,
All our mails come from google app based email server. So it has to be from the gmail server. My requirement is to create something like a email gateway with mail archiving (POP3/SMTP) and also the ability to relay mails to the gmail server on the internet.

And storing mails locally isnt going to work because the systems here get formatted quite often. So thats a bad solution.

Hi vishyc88, you asked this originally:

But now you're ruling out local storage??

The sort of thing I'm thinking of is a server running a mail retrieval agent such as getmail, allowing users to access their mail from the proxy server using a convenient protocol such as IMAP. If the proxy server is not local (intranet) there would be little advantage and you would still have a bandwidth problem.

ok i think getmail or fetchmail seems to be the solution for this.
Thanks FrankP