Hi all,

I've been running Slackware on the desktop for a year now, but I'm just now dabbling in server stuff so I'm a complete noob.

I have a 4 computer network at home, 2 Windows clients for my wife and kids, my Slackware desktop and now a Slackware file server on an old 400 MHZ box.

The McAfee antivirus subscription on the Windows boxes will expire next month and I am sick to death of paying beaucoup bucks for re-subscriptions. I've decided that I'd like to try and set up a mail server to go between the Windows boxes and my ISP. I want to have that mail server collect POP mail from from my ISP then I want a free antivirus program like ClamAV or F-prot to scan those emails and delete any infected emails. Then I want my wife and kids to be able to collect their emails from that server using Thunderbird. It isn't necessary that my wife and kids send their emails via the server so I'll just keep their current smtp settings.

How do I go about setting this up? What's the easiest secure method?

Thanks in advance.

LocoMojo

Have a look at fetchmail (man fetchmail). Combine with sendmail and a POP3 / IMAP server.

There are a bazillion how-to's on the net for doing spam / virus filtering with sendmail (eg with SpamAssassin and Clam).

Just install sendmail from Slackware official packages.

as root
So that it will start everytime you start your machine.

to start sendmail server after you install it.

Note that the default config will not allow you to use the smtp server from outside your local network (possibly outside your machine). If you want something more advance then that (full fledge mail server), others will have to help you with the config.

Postfix is the way to go, IMHO; as said earlier there are a billion how-to's floating around the net.

Thanks guys for your responses.

Hmm, fetchmail, sendmail, or postfix.

I'll have to take a look at the documentation to see which would be what I'm looking for and most painless to install and deal with.

Thanks again.

LocoMojo

I just installed fetchmail. Easy as cake. However, fetchmailconf requires X and I negelected to mention that I don't have X installed on the server.

No problem, I was able to manually edit .fetchmailrc.

I was able to poll my ISP mail server and fetchmail told me that there was mail sitting there, however, it failed to retrieve the mails because I don't have any mail readers installed on the server. I don't want to use any mail readers on the server itself. I just want to have 3 mailboxes on the server, I want fetchmail to fetch the mails from my ISP and put them in their respective user mailboxes then I want ClamAV to scan each of these mailboxes for viruses and delete viruses as they are found. Then I want my wife and kids to be able to fetch the emails from my server with their email clients on their respective machines.

Make sense? Is this doable?

LocoMojo

Absolutely. As the name implies, Fetchmail does simply that. You'll need a "MUA" (mail user agent) program such as Courier-IMAP to have mailboxes for users.

Hi mdarby,

Ok, I thought that "fetchmail" was pretty obvious.

Now let me explain something before I ask my next question.

You see, my file server only has two home directories, the default /root and /home/locomojo. My wife and kids don't have home directories on the server (I'm trying to conserve space). My wife and kids do have user accounts and smb accounts so that they may access the shared directories in /home/locomojo.

Now my question is if I install a "MUA", would I be able to set up mailboxes in /home/locomojo as follows?

/home/locomojo/mail/wife - accessible only by wife
/home/locomojo/mail/kid1 - accessible only by kid1
/home/locomojo/mail/kid2 - accessible only by kid2

Or would I be required to have home directories for each?

The MUA you mentioned is for IMAP. Could you recommend a good MUA for POP?

Thanks.

LocoMojo

Edit: Just installed Mutt, gonna give that one a shot.

I imagine that you could configure a MUA to do that, but by default (and for probably the best usage), MailDir or MBox's go into /home. The space is going to be taken anyway, why not seperate into their own /home directories to ease headaches?

I'm afraid I can't give a good recommendation for POP3; I'm an IMAP guy myself

LocoMojo,

have a read of the fetchmail man page. After fetchmail retrives mail from your ISP, it runs it through the local mail delivery system (ie on your mail server). On Slackware, that's sendmail (by default).

If you run the popa3d or IMAPD servers, your users (wife & kids) can then collect mail from your server using their regular mail clients (Mozilla Mail, Thunderbird, KMail, Evolution, Outlook etc etc).

Mail (by default) is stored in /var/spool/mail.

Most of this should work "out of the box", you'll just need to tweak the .fetchmailrc and google around for a howto on getting ClamAV to play with sendmail.

Got it all set up and it works great.

Using fetchmail, sendmail, procmail, and popa3d. My wife and kids are now downloading their mail off my server rather than directly from my ISP.

I'm reading some documentation on ClamAV and a Mail Scanner plugin now.

Thank you all for your help.

LocoMojo

clamav is a wonderful project; you'll be very happy.