Hello all!

I have searched the forum and read all the pages in the Networking section for a solution to my problem. I have a feeling I am not looking in the right direction.

I have three domains set up with email accounts through 1and1.com and wish to continue using them. What I want to do is use my file server as my email storage as well. Is there a way I can use the server to log into my 1and1.com accounts, retrieve the mail and store it. Then from any computer log into my server to retrieve the email with say, imap? The tutorials I have read all say to use my domain name at the server side, but I still want to use 1and1.

Through all the reading I have done, I have some ideas I would like to do. Accessing my email using a web browser is something I would like to do. I already have a basic web server to test sites before I they go live, so that is certainly an option.

Any help in pointing me in the right direction, or show me where I can find a tutorial to guide me would be greatly appreciated.

Here's what I do, kinda redundant, but learned a lot doing it.

All on my server:

Fetchmail collects mail from gmail.com
procmail sorts the retrieved mail and places them in the proper folders
postfix sends mail through gmail.com

Then I use Dovecot as an imap server and squirrelmail as a webmail server. This allows me to access my mail from either a web browser or an imap enabled mail client.

What you're trying to do can be done, it me a lot of time and effort, but in some twisted way at least I found it fun!!

Thank-you, this is exactly what I had in mind. At least now I know it can be done. I don't mind the time or effort, and I agree with you, in some strange way it is fun.

Now when you say procmail sorts then puts in proper folders, what exactly does that mean?

And if I use postfix to send mail, will there be a copy of that sent email on the server, or just the email client?

Again, thanks for your help....

Procmail is used to sort the incoming mail, that "fetchmail" collects, according to rules you define. It filters the mail for you. For example, here is a snippet from my procmailrc:

The first few lines define my default mail directory. The next few lines, tell procmail to put any mail that has "fedora-list@redhat.com in the To: field, into a directory called fedora-list. The last few lines tell procmail to put any mail that has "networkmanager" in the To: filed, into a directory called networkmanager.
If you didn't want your email sorted, the only statements you would need in your procmail config file, would be:

Which tells procmail to sort all incoming mail into your default mail directory.

As for postfix, it would reside on your mail server.

Ahhhh, got it! I will try this out and see how it goes. Thanks for your help!

Hi, bfc.

Your setup appears to be exactly what I need.

I used to host my email on my own server, but eventually the ISP (a local cable provider) appears to have gotten wise, and began to "throttle" the amount of traffic. My connection would go down intermittently, sometimes for long periods of time.

I finally moved to offsite hosting, but I really miss the control I used to have.

For one thing, thanks to SpamAssassin, I essentially got NO spam come through. Sendmail would use the RBLs to bounce most of the bad stuff based on origin, and Spamassassin would take care of the rest.

It was quite easy to use procmail to do all the sorting into folders, and I, too, used Dovecot and Squirrelmail exactly as you do.

I do have one question about your arrangement. Instead of a gmail account, I use my own domain which I've had for almost ten years now. I would like to continue doing that. How can I obtain my IMAP email from my "local server" (i.e. the one where all the mail eventually ends up after fetchmail goes to my hosting site and gets it, and it's all sorted) with mobile clients such as my smartphone?

I guess I can set up a machine name like "mail.domain.com" and point to that, but I thought I'd get your take on it since you seem to have thought all this out.