Good Day Everyone,

quick question - i hope -

i would like to setup a local mail server for our office. at the moment we have a fedora server that is hosted and all mail goes there and we pop it straight from there and when sending ALL email it goes directly to a web provider smtp address even if it is internal.

what i would like to do is setup my local server to fetch mail from the server and deliver it to the local user account which will be POPed instead of the main server.

then any email sent to a local user should be deliverd to their local account instead of taking a joyride accross the net.

and then lastly any email that is outbound should be sent by the server using the smtp server we use now from the isp.

now:
i have managed to setup fetchmail and it is working nicely.
i have also installed dovecot and i can pop the local server with my email client.

the last part i am stuck with is how can i setup my server to be the smtp for the mail clients so that local mail stays local and anything else get's sent out like it should.

i have looked at a good few example and tutorials but they are rather dated and/or does more than what i want.

if someone could kindly point me in the right direction it would be really apreciated.

thank you.

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ok I manged to sort myself out ... ... so i went with the postfix route and it is working perfectly the way i want it ... local mail stays local and anything else goes out via the isp.

thanx guys -

Try to use postfix is no complex configuration for local network.

Why do you want to have your own SMTP server if your ISP provides one? I have often been thinking of installing one myself as well (because it is fun), but I don't see any advantages for the company. Except that local mail remains local, but is that an issue?

The advantage of using your ISP's mail server is that he has to deal with security and hijacking and you don't. Setting up Postfix is not difficult, bit setting it up securely is more complicated. And you keep your ISP mail services anyway because of the POP boxes.

As for your question, Postfix is easy to setup, I have one running at home, doing nothing after I tested it.

BTW, now you have a mail server on your LAN I would consider IMAP server/clients. I do the same as you at our company, using fetchmail to POP e-mail off my ISP's server and drop them in Dovecot. IMAP is a real blessing if you have more than one computer for e-mail.

jlinkels

thanx for the reply ... it all makes sense, quick one our main server is where our email goes and we pop it and not from the ISP.

I was thinking to have the best of both worlds by making that local email stay local and then any email that needs to go out will be sent out as normal to the ISP's smtp so they can worry about the rest but by the server and not the user. does this make sense??

so i really dont want to do anything fancy, i just want the server to pass the mail on to the isp smtp as normal and then keep local email local.

i will give postfix a read and see what it does altogether.

- thanx for the time you took to reply.

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just had a thought ... dont i want to technically do a smtp relay of outgoing email except for that which is local ?

besides my local box is not accessible from the outside ... so security is not that big a worry ...