Hello

How can I have a linux email server that when users get their mails with their POP3 clients(win-xp) their passwords can be authenticated from (against) a WIN-2K server ?
It means:
account server is a Win-2K
Email server is Linux
Email client is Win-XP or Win98(or other POP3 clients)

And for that purpose which linux Email server software is best, Sendmail or Qmail or ... ?

Thanks

We have this set up at work.

The first thing that you should know is that the SMTP and POP services are completely separate pieces of software on Linux. SMTP puts the mail in the mailboxes and POP takes it out - they actually don't directly interact at all.

For a standard SMTP e-mail server, both sendmail and qmail are not worth the trouble. Many Linux distributions (and OS X) supply Postfix, which is the best choice for an easy to set up system that will be compatible with whatever you need to do.

For the POP service, the easiest thing to do is use whatever your distribution includes - POP doesn't have advanced features... Most use UW IMAP (which includes a POP service). UW IMAP is controlled by inetd (or xinetd), it isn't a standalone service.

Authentication is also modular in Linux. You install Samba and set up Winbind, which will enable whichever services you configure to use it to authenticate against the Windows domain.

This is all just a case of editing a few text files. The time-consuming part is learning enough about the systems to know what to edit - it look me about a couple of weeks.

I can go into more detail on specific points if you need, but that's the general outline.

>>This is all just a case of editing a few text files
>>I can go into more detail on specific points if you need, but that's the general outline.

Hello again

Thank you for your answer
i know SMTP & POP & IMAP and have installed many of their servers several times. the only thing is that I don't know how must I tell to linux to authenticate IMAP or POP3 clients against WIN-2k .
Can you tell me those above file editing in detail as you told, please ?

Thanks

If you install the Samba docs, you will find the info on how to make your server an AD member server:

/usr/share/doc/samba-3.0.2/docs/htmldocs/domain-member.html#ads-member

You can then set up Winbind:

/usr/share/doc/samba-3.0.2/docs/htmldocs/winbind.html

Note the bit about nscd - you will need to set "enable-cache" to no for the passwd and groups in /etc/nscd.conf, or weird account synchronisation issues will occur.

Once you have Winbind as an authentication source, edit the file in /etc/pam.d/ for the relevent services. They need to look like this:

auth required pam_nologin.so
auth sufficient pam_stack.so service=system-auth
auth sufficient pam_winbind.so
account sufficient pam_stack.so service=system-auth
account sufficient pam_winbind.so
password required pam_stack.so service=system-auth
session sufficient pam_stack.so service=system-auth
session required pam_limits.so
session optional pam_console.so

You just add lines for the Winbind plugin for account and auth.

The only serious problem I had was that users must have home directories for the SMTP service to accept mail for them. If you use the PAM plug-in that creates home directories when a user first logs in you still have the prblem that all mail for them will be bounced until they after they have logged in. So I wrote a Perl script that queries AD and creates the home directories for new AD users.