Hi all,
I just don't get this email thing. I got a system with RHEL 5.3 Server with dovecot, sendmail, and thunderbird. I have found tons of stuff online about configuring a mail server, but little of it tells me how to get mail from a client to the server. I've tried to work with Postfix, Pine, Sendmail, Thunderbird, and the list goes on. I'm probably so confused now that I'm not even going to convey this properly, but let me try......
I got a system called wks90 which I decided would be my mail server. I installed dovecot, sendmail, and thunderbird. Then did some basic configuration via stuff I found online. Now the test, from the command line I use the simple "mail" command which succeeds. I bring up thunderbird and eureka!!! there is a message in /var/spool/mail/george.
Now here is where I get confused and things fall apart. I go to another system named wks50. I try some similar setup in sendmail trying to point it to wks90 as the server, I assumed dovecot was not needed, made and entry in /etc/aliases, and will use my thunderbird on wks90. So at the wks50 command line I mail -v to
george@mydomain.priv. The message seems to work ok, but still goes to wks50's /var/spool/mail.
How in the name of sanity do I get the mail to go to /var/spool/mail on wks90? OR somewhere that is centrally located. I tried to mount /var/spool/mail to wks50, but then wks50's mail to root started queueing up and going nowhere.
I guess I got the whole concept of mail wrong somewhere in my thinking. I just want the mail from any client to wind up at one server (wks90) and in a central location on wks90 so that any client like wks50, wks60, and wks70, using thunderbird, can read the mail from that central location. To me this sounds like I need to mount that central location to each client, but how do I then deal with the queuing root mail? Or is sounds like a need something like that old "movemail" command to take it and move it.
I have another server that is the HOME server (server1). The physical location of all $HOMEs is here i.e. /home/george. Would this be a better mail server?
Ok enough ... this is getting to long.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.