Damn, this is proving a nightmare! I want a reasonably simple email server that will do the following:

Go to pop.myaccount.com; pick up all the mail from there and separate the mails into the relevant mailboxes so that my wife can pick hers up using Outlook (yeah, I know - but what can you do?) and I can pick them up from k-mail. Also, of course, we want to send the mails out using smtp.

I want the mail sever to run on a Linux machine that is connected all the time to the Internet via ADSL through a Smoothwall firewall. I want the program to check with my ISP every five mins automatically, then hold the mails 'til the clients on my wife's machine and my machine poll the mail server for any mail.

I've tried a few different things, qmail, masqmail, eXtremail, but I really can't see if any of them really do what I want.

I'm currently doing it with a Win2k program MDaemon which was a breeze to set up and made it obvious that it would do what I wanted.

Anyone a suggestion as to what would do it for me?

Cheers,

Rob

PS Mail server will probably be running on a non X Slackware machine, but I haven't really decided yet. Also, I'm setting this up on Mandy 8.1 just to prove it works before dismantling my Win2k server and turning it into a Linux machine!

well.. afaic k-mail is VERY similar to outlook... it's a nasty gitof a program which doesn't like MH mail standards. i'd certainly suggest you didn't use that.

to get the mail from wherever you need fetchmail. easily configured using fetchmailconf and will do EXACTLY what you want as far as that goes.

as for smtp... well sendmail, postfix or qmail will deal with that ok. I've no idea what their default setup would be tho, but on my rh72 server, the default sendmail install wasjust limited to internal mail only, and i only needed to enable it. on mandrake you get postfix by default.. which is meant to be easier, but i've not tried it.

and then to get the mail from your nice server into yuckky OE you'll want an imap server on the mail box. that's genreally very easy to set up.

and to get mail to your local linux box.. well you *should* use nfs or somethgin similar to that, which makes teh mail appear in the same place on your local system as on the server.. easy. yuo could alternatively just use the imap server if your seriously using kmail... actually, i'd recommend it for kmail, as it WILL mess up your proper mail folders otherwise. i'd recommend using pine or mutt personally.. but for a higher level one.. sylpheed (arse name...) is very simialr to OE, and DOES use MH mail boxes (i.e. /var/spool/mail/username).

Ah, in other words it's a grade one nightmare! No wonder I'm struggling with it.

This seems to be the hardest thing I've come across since starting out on my Linux adventures. I don't understand why there isn't an integrated package to do it.

I'm probably being naive and too used to Windows' hand holding I s'pose!

eXtremail seemed pretty close to doing what I wanted, apart from how to get the mails from my ISP.

Thanks for your help, Trev.

PS I'm not over impressed with k-mail, but then again I rather liked NT's old "In Box. k-mail came with Mandy 8.1 and was easier to set up that anything else I'd found and less bloaty and far quicker than Evolution!

if you have one huge single package to do it then.. well what if one part of this isn't *quite* as good as you want? what if you'd rather it was done a different way? what if you only want one tiny bit? i only used to need fetchmail, as i only had one box.. haivng to install an smtp, uimap, pop server as well would be daft. And all these things are certanily separate things. how much more integrated would you want? You could easily get to argue that with smtp and pop AND imap, you should also include an nntp server... and so forth? modularisation is the PERFECT solutino, and has no drawbacks really, other than that of having to find each part. also, with each being a spearte program, you don't need it all to work at once. i'd suggest getting fetchmail sorted first, then imap... and then when that's all ok, smtp. or not bother.. it's all up to you. and each service can be stopped without affecting others. wel, most of them

Point taken!

So, the next question is:

Where can I find reasonably detailed info of how to knit the requisite programs together? I have had a long, long search on the net to no avail. :-(

well, they don't really knit together much at all. fetchmail's interaction is that it gives all it's data to the local mail server. the local mail server just adds the data onto the end of a text file. the imap server just read's this text file... just do it step by step. you should already haveinternal mail running. just try

echo hello | mail -s hello username and then check that users email acounts, and they shold have a new email.... if that works then sort fetchmail out... adn so forth

OK, I'm having a go with Fetchmail now. Thank very much for all your help. :-)