Having ISSUES with email set up.
PLEASE HELP!
I can't seem to figure out how to set up a reliable, and more importantly, WORKING email delivery system (I've tried lots of stuff, but I'm pretty new at this). I need advice as to the best set up for what I am trying to do. Feel free to skip sections you think are irrelevant to you, as I am trying to provide as much info as possible in order to get some sort of response.
Here is what I am trying to accomplish:
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I would like to be notified immediately when my multiple email accounts recieve email. These email accounts are located on my hosting provider, not locally. In addition, my hosting provider does not offer spam filtering, so I would like to integrate Spam Assassin into my solution (rather than use email clients' built-in filtering). I want all email accessible via IMAP for convenience and backup purposes.
Here are the limitations and available resources:
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My hosting provider offers unlimited email addresses, and has forwarding capabilities. To receive email, it supports both POP3 and IMAP (with IDLE support) protocols.
Our local network has a firewall, and behind it, a linux box which currently serves up our email. Fetchmail runs as a daemon with a 5 min. polling interval. It is tiresome to have to initiate the fetchmail manually from remote and 5 min. can be a waste of time when expecting an email. There are several user accounts on this machine, and each user has more than one email address (usually variations of the main one...i.e. mbditt@, matt@, matthew@, etc.). I have set up courier-imap as the local mail server and it has been working fine for our previous configuration.
Here are some ideas (haven't found a working combination yet, but again...I'm new...this is where I need help!):
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I have decided that probably the best way to grab emails is using fetchmail's IMAP support. I can run it in daemon mode with the idle option...that way, the instant a message is received on the remote end, it is pushed straight to the local email server. The issue here is that each user can only run one fetchmail daemon and each daemon can only idle one account.
I have also been struggling with setting up a multidrop email account. I successfully configured fetchmail to idle the account and grab emails, but I can't seem to get emails distributed properly beyond that. I have set up procmail recipes to sort by the To or Envelope-To headers, but when messages are delivered, they are delivered owned by the postmaster account...so users cannot read them. I also hear that multidrop configurations can lose emails or just not work.
I have tried several other things (don't remember exactly what...) but they didn't work either.
I am convinced that my problems are configuration issues but I can't find any good documentation explaining any of it! So hopefully someone knows how to do what I am trying, and can help me out....
-Jimmy Tango
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