Intranet mail delivery with linux server?
 

Hi Everyone:

I'm looking to implement an intranet mail delivery system on our office network. The workstations are utilizing Outlook, and I currently have a win98 machine that has the mailbox on it that acts as the mail server. i want to get rid of this and use my linux samba box to do this.

I know that postfix is an Mail Transit agent, which i believe means that it gets the mail from the internet but doesn't deliver it to individual mailboxes. What can i use in linux, if not postfix, to do what i mentioned in the first paragraph? I've heard of procmail but am not sure if that's what i'm looking for.

Any help/suggestions?

Thanks.

PAB

You will be looking for a pop or imap server, if you want to store the mail on the server then I would use courier-imap but if you want to download all of the mail to the client then look into qpopper.

Thanks for the input. However, i'm not exactly sure which I'm trying to setup. I think that the current setup (with win98) stores all the mail on the server and then the individual clients download it. i would like to new system to do it the same way as the old, but i'm tired of relying on an old win98 machine and want to integrate mail with my linux server. i'm just not aware of the terminology of what i'm looking for.

you mention having everything stored on the server. with that setup, when i address mail to someone in the office using outlook, does it go to the server where it is stored and then the other person's outlook obtains it from the server? if so, i think that is exactly what i want. Can you just acknowledge if this is correct? if so, i'll take a very long look @ courier-imap.

Thanks a bunch.

PAB

With both pop and imap the e-mails are stored on the server until a client connects, with IMAP you have the ability to keep the messages there organsied in folders (this is good if you want to have web based access as well, it also allows for centralised backups). If you use pop then the client usually just deletes the copy on the server when it downloads it (this is good if the server doesn't have much space)

I use sendmail for my intranet MTA. Sendmail works really well but its very hard to configure. As far as using outlook and thunderbird to access email, I just set them up appropriately to download the mail from the server.

Not sure if I understand this - can I use sendmail/postfix as strictly an internal email system?

pab