I set up qmail, and i can send mail with qmail-inject and telnet to port 25 (it works).

Q1: Is there a command line program (part of qmail) to receive mail? How come telnet to port 110 refused?

Q2: In windows clients like OE / Outlook there are settings like "POP Server" and "SMTP Server". What should go there (server IP is 192.168.0.X) and what is the username?

Q3: How do I tell unix clients like Mutt to use the qmail server?

If there is an easy to understand online tutorial/faq that you know of, please post links too. Thanks in advance.

I'm assuming you've setup qmail to deliver to Maildir type mailboxes... if you haven't then some of this will not help. (Maildirs are pretty good though.)

A1: receiving mail. have a look for mutt or pinq or other command-line progs that can read a Maildir.

A quick&dirty thing to do with a Maildir is look for new files in ~USER/Maildir/new directory. Any file there is a message the user has received and not read yet. If USER doesn't have a Maildir then it won't be delivered - messages will stay in the queue and eventually bounce.

Port 110: did you set up a POP3 daemon? if not, that's what you need to allow clients on other machines to get mail. (Yes, there are other things than POP but he said port 110, ok?) qmail-popd is the obvious choice if you're using qmail. The FAQ with qmail tells how to do it, you also need to build checkpassword from http://cr.yp.to

A2: Set the clients to use 192.168.0.X as the SMTP and POP server.

Username: The standard thing is to make a Unix user account for each user and make a Maildir in their home directory. They don't need to have shell access, the POP server will check their Unix username and password and let them have any mail that's waiting.

A3: I don't use mutt but if your'e running it on the mailserver, you just have to tell it to read from your Maildir. If you're running it on a different machine, you still have to get the mail to that machine before you read it with mutt - a unix host can run its own copy of qmail, or you setup fetchmail... (Or not, I use a nice GTK mailreader called sylpheed which does POP and SMTP. Highly recommended.)

If it's going to have an internet connection, please check your new mailserver isn't an open relay! The spammers WILL find it.

Some links:

http://www.qmail.org - has all kinds of info.
http://lifewithqmail.org - an alternative, worth dipping into.
http://sylpheed.good-day.net/ - sylpheed mail client

OK. Thank you.

One more question. The pop3 daemon works, but it doesn't receive mail from outside my LAN. How can I check if my router is receiving / forwarding requests on port 110? Can I use ping?

err, POP doesn't usually receive mail from other hosts, SMTP does. POP just lets a user check their mailbox from another machine.

If your router does NAT aka IP masquerading, then you can't usually reach the server from outside your LAN. If you want to do that, look for port forwarding on your router. Unless I misunderstood what you mean?

Oh. :| Sorry, it just never seemed obvious. So I tell my router to forward port 25, and 110 only if mail needs to be checked from outside the LAN, yes?
It is now an open relay. I guess I will use it for sending only until I have the time to fix it.

The router should forward port 110 to the mailserver only if someone outside needs POP access.

It should forward port 25 if you want the mailserver to receive mail direct by SMTP. Usually this would mean it's listed in the DNS, in a MX record for some domain. And please don't do this until you've closed the relaying! IMO It's safe as an open relay as long as port forwarding is off - it isn't accessible from the 'net.

It's not hard to close a relay with qmail and tcpserver... look at the -x option of tcpserver. You make a file which says for which IP addresses qmail should relay (probably your LAN only), and allows connections but no relay for other addresses. Then you run that file through smtprules to make the cdb file that tcpserver uses. The following rules might be enough, check it at http://cr.yp.to/ucspi-tcp/tcprules.html

192.168.0.:allow,RELAYCLIENT=""
.:allow

i haven't set up any MX records, but it works now. Thank you for your help. If you've followed life with qmail, you can edit /etc/tcp.smtp and then qmailctl cdb to rebuild the tcpserver's cdb file too. Its easier.