Hi
I am attempting to setup a mailserver on a Debian box.
It needs to do the following
SMTP server so my ISP can deliver mail to me
fetch mail using pop3 from other email accounts
Web mail of some form
IMAP so my girlfriend can use outlook to view her mail
Be secure

Q. What is the minimum amount of software I need (I've looked at sendmail, postfix, courier/cyrus IMAP, fetchmail and procmail so far)

Q. I have been playing with postfix and I can get mail delivered to var/mail/$user. How do I get it to somewhere more sensible?

Q. I've managed to get fetchmail telling me it has grabbed my mail but I don't know where it puts it (it's not in var/mail/$user)

Q. I've installed procmail but I'm not really sure how to get it to do anything (or even entirely understand what it's for)

Q. At a high level how do these things chain together, my basic understanding is this.

Mail delivered by SMTP
ISP
SMTP
Postfix
Procmail
IMAP
Client

Mail fetched by Fetchmail
POP3
Postfix (via port 25)
Procmail
IMAP
Client

Any help would be excellent I've been struggling with this for ages.
Dave

You said you wanted webmail and IMAP, so get Squirrelmail and an IMAP server (courier-imap and uw-imap are common ones). fetchmail will do fine for pulling mail from your ISP's server if you want to do that. Since you're using IMAP, why also use POP3? IMAP has far more features and is supported by most common email clients.

/var/mail/$user is where mail is usually delivered, at least on Debian systems. Where would you want it stored and why?

fetchmail delivers to the local MDA (mail delivery agent, usually exim on Debian systems unless you have replaced it) by default, so if you have an MDA running that's what fetchmail will use. Does your local mail delivery work as expected? Read the man page (man fetchmail).

Procmail is used to sort incoming mail to the correct mail boxes or folders. If you run it as root you can use it as an MDA. Again, the man page is very useful.


Håkan

If you are looking for a different delivery location then read up on postfix using maildirs. It should tell you how to make postfix use maildir over mbox (maildir is superior, I can point you to a reason why if you wish to see it) and how to set the location of a users maildir to there homedirectory or anywhere else on your system in the postfix docs.

Thanks, I think I'm going to install exim and see how that works for me. If I want to use MailDir do I still store the mail in /var/mail??
Confusing business...
Dave