Hi,
Here at my organization we are in need to set up a more advanced email solution and I thought I could come here and ask for help.

We currently have a borderware firewall server installed, and its main function within our network is to serve as the bridge between our internal network and the internet, as the firewall protecting us from the outside.

But this server also has a minimal pop3/smtp functionality, which is what we are currently using as mail server solution. My intention is to maintain this, but to setup an IMAP mail server within our network using a linux server (debian is my current choice) that works in the background against the borderware pop3, and that also sends email to the outside through the borderware smtp.

This way, we can have a better user experience in our client boxes, setting up email clients to use IMAP instead of POP, so that email stays on the server no matter what PC a member uses to access his/her email (well everybody knows the advantages of IMAP over POP), and we can also setup a webmail interface (squirrelmail is my current choice), because currently our members are not able to access their email from the rest of the world, when they're abroad.

Any ideas on what packages to use and how to setup this mail infrastructure, or any suggestions on how to change this layout in order to better achieve my final goals?

Thanks in advance, and if something was not clear enough, please feel free to ask and I will clarify any obscure matter.

Well, you have already mentioned what webmail application you want to use so that leaves us to decide the rest.

You probably want a real mail server (SMTP). My preference is Postfix or Exim. Both are available in Debian so installation should be smooth. You will need an IMAP4rev1 server (it is a requirement of Squirrelmail). courier-imap and cyrus-imap should both be available in the official Debian repositories, but there are many others. uw-imap is still going strong and Dovecot appears popular.

You can read up on the rest at the Squirrelmail homepage, which has excellent documentation. Also check out the administration guides Gentoo provides. They are targeted at Gentoo users but can be applied to other distributions as well and provide good ideas and hints on where to look for different configuration options.


Håkan

Well, thanks for your reply and your advice. And sorry if I didn't explain myself properly. I mentioned squirrelmail as being my current choice, but I welcome suggestions in this respect. I never meant to say that I was tied to using it.

I thought about SquirrelMail and Horde, but horde seemed to me as a complete groupware solution, which is by the way something else that I'm looking for. The problem with Horde (and with phpGroupware, eGroupware, Hula) is that they're not functional with native desktop-based clients such as outlook or evolution. For the moment what I need most is to setup our email with IMAP, and setup a webmail interface upon the IMAP server. It is something I will need to do anyway, when we decide ourselves for a groupware suite provider.

For the time being, I will investigate the packages and softwares that you mention as possible choices.