Re: [gentoo-user] modest mail server for home network

["Mickey Mullin" <mickey@dreamwolf.us>]

On 3/7/06, Robert Persson <ireneshusband@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> I want to set up a very modest home mail server that will collect emails from
> other pop3 servers and make them available to 2 or 3 users using 1 or more
> different clients on 2 or 3 computers.
> [snip]
> I have spent way to much time trying to get courier running only to find that
> (a) it doesn't work and (b) it doesn't seem to be able to fetch mail from an
> external server. I then installed fetchmail, but can't find any howtos on
> installing it as a service, or any clear explanation of how it plays
> alongside courier or any other imap server.

>From "man fetchmail":
"The --daemon <interval> or -d <interval> option runs fetchmail in
daemon mode. You must specify a numeric argument which is a polling
interval in seconds."

Two things that may help searching for that sort of thing in the
future: 1) "services" as you know them on Windows are referred to as
"daemons" on Linux/UNIX and 2) if you are in man or less, "/" (forward
slash) begins a search, and then "n" repeats the search (after typing
it and hitting enter).

> The absolute #1 consideration is that the system must be easy to set up and
> easy to move to another machine when the time comes.
>
> smtp is not important at the moment because the isp smtp service usually
> works.

Unfortunately, what you describe is not a simple or common setup, so
"easy to set up" may be a difficult goal to accomplish. Also,
fetchmail expects an SMTP service to which it can deliver the mail it
receives.

It seems to me that the minimum you need are: an SMTP server, a POP3
server, and fetchmail. You could probably get by the simplest by
creating system actual users on the Gentoo mailserver box for each of
the people in your scenario and setting up fetchmailconfs in each
user's home directory. Then use the most basic SMTP and POP3 servers
you can find (ssmtp may even work). Ironically, I've never set up such
a simple configuration, so I can't guide you much further than that.

Mickey

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