Skip a step in the Email process
 

Hello -

First off, I must say these forums are incredibly useful! They ease the
Win-->Linux transition greatly.

I can usually find answers to my questions by searching and searching, but since I couldn't find the answer this time, I figured I'd go ahead and fire away the question.

Currently our email goes from sender to the ISP's pop server, where it waits until we fire up our mail client Outlook and the mail is downloaded from the pop server and is now in the Outlook message store.

Currently, I am setting up a fedora box with postfix for both SMTP and POP. But I want to eliminate that last POP-to-Outlook step. I want us to be able to log in locally or remotely and have old mail and new mail be in one place, preferrably using a different client (Duh. Any suggestions?)

Right now if we log in remotely to our ISP's IMAP server we can view the new mail not yet read by Outlook, but any mail already read by Outlook is no longer there. Grrr.

I hope this makes sense. I have heard of this setup but don't know how it works. Please point me in the right direction! (apps/guides/faqs)

TIA

Mike A

I think the best way would be to run your own IMAP server and use fetchmail to get your mail from the ISP, I'm not sure if you are going to let peope send mail direct to your server or not but you should end up with:

Thanks for the visual response :)

Yes, mail will come directly to our server. I want to forego the ISP's mail altogether.

In testing out our mail server, I set up a user mailtest, sshed in and used evolution to read/send mail with evolution set to "local delivery." This removes the POP-to-outlook step, but...

a. The users we're talking about probably aren't computer savvy and such a solution may not sit well with them. Any Windows-user-friendly similar solutions?

b. I was envisioning having the users "download" the mail from our server to their WS. But now that I think about it, it probably makes more sense if our server is the final resting place. Old and new mail could live together in peace :) Access from LAN or VPN would be transparent. Backups would be centralized. Next question would be "What is the best way to go about this, in addition to the one mentioned above?"

Thanks again!

Mike A

I'm not 100% sure waht you mean by pop-Outlook. If you use IMAP rather than pop the mail will be saved on the server and can be accessed directly from outlook or via a webbased interface like squirrelmail or IMP.

Oh, so IMAP avoids the POP3 problem where read messages can now only be accessed on the computer that accessed them. (Sound of lightbulb)

Consider this newbie sufficiently pointed in the right direction. I'm off to learn me some IMAP! Thanks.

Mike A

Yes, thats correct.

Pop is still widely used over IMAP as it uses less server resources and disk space but IMAP is much more flexible and should solve your problems.

just an addition to POP - A POP mail client can choose to leave a copy of the message on the server. Just tick the checkbox on your MUA if you plan to use just POP and leave messages on the server.