I'm fairly familiar around Linux as far as using as a, well, user.

What I'd like to do now is set it up my Linux system (Mandrake LE2005) as an e-mail server which I can connect to from other systems via IMAP.

For the life of me, though, I cannot figure out how to configure the computer to be an e-mail server. I don't even know where to begin. How do I get to the point where I can start adding users as in "user@domain.com"? What software do I need and how do I configure it? I cannot find a good guide that will tell me what to do from the command line.

Thanks for any help!

If you want your server to recieve mail from other machines (not just itself), you need an MTA. Google for `MTA comparison' (iirc). sendmail is (the most) popular, but there are others (I run exim).

As a rule of thumb, if you want a foo server, google/apt-cache search for `food' (foo-dee); in your example: smtpd, popd and imapd.

Hope this gets you started --Jonas

I also use Exim as my mta and cyrus as my imap server, but take a look around at www.qmailrocks.org it contains a complete guide on how to make your own mail server.