Hey,

I've recently run into all kinds of trouble with my email. You see, I have several email addresses on many different servers with various restrictions (size, number of messages, message size, etc...). It's difficult to do several logins as well as keep track of all the restrictions on different servers.

Therefore, I thought it may be a good idea to set up a central email server using an old 586 machine. Essentially, it should be an IMAP server (with perhaps a webmail interface) that, once I login, would fetch mail from all the various POP3 and IMAP servers that currently store my mail, store it on the local hard drive, and delete it from the external servers. That way, I wouldn't have to worry about exceeding storage capacity on external servers. Also, keep in mind that many of the servers where I have email addresses don't support forwarding so just running an IMAP server isn't good enough. The setup would have to work such that when I login, it would login to all external servers, retrieve mail from there, and store it locally.

Has anyone done something like this before? How would I go about setting up something like this?

Thanks.

What you're asking for isn't a big deal - mail collectors like fetchmail enable you to do this, and it used to be a common setup at one time. You'll need to install and configure the three pieces separately: the IMAP server (Dovecot or Cyrus), the Webmail interface (SquirrelMail or Roundcube), and the mail collector.

if you lazy , install usermin ( from webmin site ), then user login is user shell account via web frm your workstation , from usermin interface u can set several server for u to fetch it , i think no so dificult , viola your own server diskspace

I think Usermin/Webmin enable you to configure fetchmail.

Thanks for the reply.

I didn't think that this would be a big deal. I am currently using fetchmail to check various pop3 servers and I figured that the only difference would be that fetchmail would have to forward mail to Cyrus via LMTP (or some other way). Does that sound right?

The only thing that I am not sure of is how I would get Cyrus to run fetchmail. You see, most information I found on the web suggests having fetchmail retrieve mail every X seconds with the -d flag. I would rather that my IMAP server run fetchmail when somebody logs in instead. That way, I could be sure that I am looking at the latest mail and not have fetchmail constantly logging in to all external mail servers.

And no, I'd rather not use Webmin/Usermin. The webmail interface is not that critical. I'd rather set up the IMAP properly first.

Thanks again.