I have installed Fedora core 4 using the DVD distro and all seems to be working well.

I intend to setup squirrelmail and dovecot IMAP server as well but I cannot locate the user mail folders. I can see the mail spool folders and they are just text files with the emails listed inside.

Dovecot requires certain types of mail folder or mbox to operate but either of these are not being created when a new user is created. FC3 created the mail folders automatically when a new user was created (or logged in for the first time).

Do I have to create these folders myself from now on for each new user (and the existing ones) or is there a setting that has not been set by default that creates these mail folders when a user is created?

Is it a matter of installing some kind of mail client (eg. pine) to set these folders or mbox's up?

Cheers for your help in advance.

This seems a little strange. What exactly are you trying to do? Obviously you want some remote users to be able to access their mail over the internet but how is that mail getting to your server in the first place?
It is important to know this because the program that sends any downloaded mail to the user it is destined for will define which style of mailbox you will need to setup, mbox or maildir.

You said :
This is the mbox style which simply appends any new emails that are received for a particular user to a single large file. And once again it depends on which program is handling the transfer of the mail as to where these files are stored & what they are called. When you say you "can see the mail spool folders" I assume this means that there are some files in /var/spool/mail that have the same names as the users you have so far added to your system. Is this correct or are they somewhere else in the filesystem? If this is correct then it is more than likely that the transfer mechanism for any mail entering your server is a program called "sendmail". sendmail uses the mbox style mailbox's & by default stores them in /var/spool/mail.

The reason that a new mbox is not appearing when you create a new user is because sendmail hasn't been informed about this new user yet. But when the user receives their first email, sendmail will check that the user exists in the system user database & create the necessary files to store the new email in. To test this, add a new user called "mail-test" & have a look in /var/spool/mail (or wherever you found the mail spool folders), there should NOT be a file called "mail-test". Then open a terminal & type :
Then type anything you like for the subject, the next line is the first line of the body of the email so again type anything, then to finish the email simply type a single dot (.) on a line by itself, hit <ENTER> one last time to leave the CC blank. Now look again in /var/spool/mail & there should now be a file called "mail-test" that contains the email you just wrote in the correct email format. If this doesn't work then we'll have to delve a little deeper.

mbox is not the preferred mailbox style to use because if something happens to the file that a users mail is stored in, like data corruption, or a power failure while the file is being written to, then ALL of that users emails are lost forever. The alternative, maildir, is much better because each individual email message is stored as a separate file within a specific directory structure, this way if something happens during a read or write only the message being accessed will be affected, so instead of losing everything only one message will be lost.

It is widely recognized in the world of email server administrators that sendmail is not a particularly good Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). It has a long history of security issues, is notoriously difficult to configure & maintain & it uses the mbox style mailbox's. So if you are only messing around with building a mail server, trying to learn about how email systems work simply because it interests you, then you could probably get away with leaving sendmail as your MTA, but if you are learning this because you eventually need to build a full blown mail server that will be used as a real, must work every time email server then you should really think about scrapping sendmail & learning a more secure, practical MTA. I have tried a few different ones & have found qmail to be my favourite. There is an excellent tutorial site called qmailrocks.org that I have found to be an enormous help when setting up a complete mail server from start to finish, you can find it at --> http://www.qmailrocks.org

Sorry this got a bit long winded, & I didn't mean to insult you if you already knew some of this stuff. Setting up a mail server can be a very complex undertaking & it helps a lot if you start with a specific goal in mind as to what you want your server to achieve.

Please post again soon with the answers to my questions so I can help you further.

fuzzyash,

Greatly appreciate your time and response, don't concern yourself over offending me, I have gained some valuable knowledge from your reply and thats what it is all about.

Back on topic.

I am trying to setup a mail server and my intention was to use sendmail as my MTA. I have heard about (as you stated) some security issues with sendmail but was going to use it anyway because I have set a mail server up in FC3 using sendmail and I was somewhat familiar with it. I am open to challenge myself with a new more secure MTA. My intention was to setup a server with:
sendmail (MTA)
IMAP (Dovecot) - I want access through MS Outlook
Squirrelmail (webaccess)

I am flexible on all of these solutions if there is a better cenario.

I will be registering an external domain but I already have a local domain setup. I have not decided if I will resolve the external domain to this server or host the domain externally and use something like fetchmail. Your thaughts would be helpful on this.

You are correct. /var/spool/mail is the mail spool location.

I have already sent mail to the other users on the system using webmin and that works ok. The spool files are created and contain the emails I sent.

What has thrown me is that I thought the maildir folders were automatically created when a user was created. I think this happened with my FC3 installation, not so with the FC4 machine.

I am currently having a good look at qmailrocks.org as you suggested. I will post feedback.

Once again I appreciate your time.

Cheers

Fuzzyash,

Still there?

Sorry heals1ic, been a little busy. I'll post you a responce a little latter today!
Again, very sorry!

Once again, oh-so-sorry for my tardiness! I design automated assembly robots for the automotive industry & I also help build the machines that I design when it's a large project to ensure it goes together just as I intended. We've just finished a huge machine that plastic welds all the add-on components to the 2007 Commodore's fuel tank. The final weeks of projects of this size always mean long days & little sleep. But I've a few spare moments now so I'll try to help you as much as I can.

Anyway, back to business...

So it seems that your not a total virgin to the mail server mistress! This is good!

Probably the biggest qualm I have with sendmail these days is it's complexity, from what I've read it's come a long way from a security standpoint, still not as tight as some others, but much better than it used to be. It boasts quite a lot of functions but I just don't need that much from my MTA, so I chose to opt for the simplicity of qmail.

I hope qmailrocks gave you a clearer basic understanding of just how different qmail is to sendmail, particularly with the way it is configured. I have found that sendmail could do a lot more than qmail but, as with most things, the more a program is capable of the more complex it's configuration needs to be in order to have all those features interact with one-another. So after quite a lot of research I discovered that qmail & it's friends could do everything I needed for a fast, reliable, mail server that only really had to be able to cope with several virtual domains, retrieve mail from a central location for all those domains, deliver it to the correct mailbox & ensure that it remained tight enough so it could not be used as a relay point by the malicious amongst us.

It sounds like the setup you are looking for is very much the same as the setup I use at work.
I have only ever had domain names that are hosted by an external authority, we use http://www.webcentral.com.au/ which I find to be excellent. The reason for this is because we use Optusnet for our Internet connection & they block certain ports that we need to create a complete email & HTTP server, unless your prepared to pay the money to upgrade your service to get them unblocked. I have not looked very deeply into what's involved with hosting your own public domain but I do know it's a lot more involved than simply getting someone else to do it for you, it requires a lot more maintenance & basic TLC. As for "fetchmail", I use "getmail" which I believe is much the same as fetchmail. Their job is fairly basic so whichever you choose you should have no troubles with.

Let me know what you think of qmail after reading qmailrocks!