hi

i want to setup a simple email server on my home LAN

i want it to ....

periodically download mail from a number of POP3 accounts (all of the form account_name@myISP.com)and then serve these mails up to LAN clients using IMAP

i don't need spam or AV scanning as that takes place at the gateway and SMTP can all occur from the LAN clients directly - so it's incoming mail only

there a 4 user accounts on the server, but multiple POP3 accounts associated with each

users would need to be able to set there own IMAP passwords but the connection between LAN clients and server does not need to be encrypted

i'm thinking i need fetchmail and dovecot to do the collecting/serving - anything else ??

can anyone help me out here or point me to a comprehensive (noob proof!) howto - i've googled and searched but most of the stuff seems too much for my needs

thanks

neill

yeah fetchmail and dovecot should do you just fine. one point here is that the two services will know *nothing* about each other. they do not interact in any way whatsoever. so don't go looking for docs to cover a fetchamil and dovecot installation, as between the two services, all there is a a number of emails sitting on a drive as text files. so just worry about fetchmail to start with, should be fairly simple, just repetetive for a number of accounts. get the emails happily downloading and once that's done, move on.

OK thanks i'll get on with that

couple of quick things

is it 'OK' from a security standpoint to run these on the same server as all all the LAN data (served up to XP clients with samba) or should i have a dedicated server in a DMZ ?


does fetchmail send passwords in clear text to the POP servers, on encrypted ?

thanks again

neill

it's not great to have a public and private facing service on one host, but there are limits people have to work within, i wouldn't necessarily worry too much with those services, as long as they up toe most recent versions, not old versions with known flaws and such.

fetchmail can handle most authentication mechanisms, but afaik doesn't try multiple methods in order of preference etc... if you want it to use ssl encryption, you tell it to and if it doesn't work, it won't fall back etc.

OK i'm half way there now

using getmail (which i found v user friendly to setup) i can suck all the mails from my POP3 accounts and stick them in various maildirs like this

/home/me/maildir-account1
/home/me/maildir-account2

and so on

what i need to do is serve these up to the LAN using some IMAP server - it doesn't really matter which as ease of use is the prime concern

ideally each maildir on the server would be in effect a separate IMAP account from the point of view of the MUA on the LAN client, with its associated uname and pword - how can i do that?

or do i need to approach this in a different way altogether ??

thanks

neill

i would *think* that you'd really only want a single maildir strcuture, with each accounts emails being placed into a subfolder. that's what would make sense to me, as you only have one maildir to check, yet have all mail, clearly sorted basd on origin. i couldn't tell you how to do this with getmail, never touched it, but i'm sure it can do it, and will leave you with a totally standardised maildir that any pop3 / imap maildir server, like dovecot, can handle without blinking.

OK thanks again i'll get onto it